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“... gallant men, and I thought them fools.’ What, I wonder, did these ‘fools’ think of John Milton as he watched and judged and yet abstained from their pleasures? Towards the end of his Latin poem on the death of his university friend Carlo Diodati, Milton expresses the fear that he might sound ‘turgidulus’. He then launches into a description ...”

“... is different: how seldom in our time a writer gets a second chance. If you start off on the wrong foot, as she admits she did (‘I wrote as lushly and as loosely as I could’), you’ll be lucky if anyone notices when you change step. This, too, I can corroborate, in a way that does me no credit: disliking her first book, Loss of the Magyar (1959), I wrote ...”

“... in 1968. Several of their colleagues are from the North: the poets Seamus Heaney, Seamus Deane, John Montague, Michael Longley. Deane, especially, has been important to them, arguing about Irish literature and the question of tradition, the North, the two languages, the available rhetorics. I have been reading The Crane Bag in association with Hugh ...”

“... of its maturity’, without trying to find validation for that style in personal tragedy, as John Berger apparently did. For Berger, Hyman writes, ‘the late nudes were the sole redeeming component in an oeuvre otherwise “intimate, contemplative, privileged”; it was the “tragedy” of his relationship with Marthe that “ensured his survival as a ...”

“... posthumous progress through the collective psyche of her country’. Historians, beginning with John Foxe and William Camden in her own time, and extending across the centuries to Patrick Collinson and David Starkey in our own, have examined Elizabeth’s reign from a variety of angles, analysing its various subtle strategies and compromises, attempting to ...”

“... book would have been unputdownable. He corresponded extensively with Pope and Richardson. He gave John Gay a job on his periodical The British Apollo when the future Scriblerian was newly arrived in London from Devon, and was an early and influential advocate of the Scottish poets Mallett and Thomson (the bardic conception of the poet’s role elaborated in ...”

“... it, producing not only Rockwell, Guest and the Saturday Evening Post but also Georges Simenon, John Steinbeck and the New Yorker (‘high-class kitsch for the luxury trade’). With kitsch running wild, like the capitalism which propelled it, authenticity needed defending. For nearly fifty years, Greenberg shouldered the task, separating good art from bad ...”

“... anti-ministerial ‘Advice to a Painter’ satires were absurdly attributed to the royalist poet John Denham); and in the case of published books, the printer’s name and location could be disguised by the use of a false imprint.For Thomas Keymer in his beautifully detailed history, such strategies of evasion are one of the things that make seditious ...”

“... out, these concerns are not new. In 1875, less than ten years after the movement was founded, Sir John Strachey, a senior British colonialist, asked his colleague John Palmer to infiltrate the madrasa at Deoband and to report back on what he found there. Having taken a look Palmer concluded: ‘there cannot be a better ...”

“... includes a dozen of them, mostly in their entirety.Interest in his life is sharpening. After John Stuart Roberts’s compact and readable single volume of 1999, we now have Jean Moorcroft Wilson’s double-header, with Max Egremont’s somewhat shorter Life expected soon. Sassoon’s story has also reached a wider audience through television re-creations ...”

“... called ‘father’. The knot tied, Turner and another parish employee escorted the bridegroom on foot to Uckfield to get Parkes to ‘swear his parish’, which proved to be Hellingly: whereupon a messenger had to be sent back to remove the bride there. Turner was engaged non-stop in this business from two in the morning till nine at night, at a cost to the ...”

“... born towards the end of the century’. And while he’s very good on the Hampshire history – John Tyndall, Tennyson, Allen’s radical fiction – it doesn’t tell us much about Thompson. The fact that Austen’s Chawton was ‘just twenty miles away’ hardly seems impressive – it’s unlikely Thompson thought that was a short distance; she certainly ...”

“... one of the medieval relics of the Abbey, the stone supposedly with the imprint of Christ’s foot when he took off for the Ascension. I’m not sure if this is the square stone on the front of the tomb or the roundel on the top but I lay my hand on both as maybe pilgrims did once, though why I’d find it hard to say. It’s a beautiful tomb, the arch ...”

“... to just sit behind a desk somewhere and think sad stuff all day long.’ The central character in John Le Carré’s new novel is said to have ‘a whole self-accusing chorus’ within him: ‘He had people inside himself who really drove him mad.’ Not as mad as the people outside himself are trying to drive him, though. This is a book about hearts rather ...”

“... loved. If one had to pick a mathematical genius at the furthest pole from Erdös, it might well be John Forbes Nash, 1994 Nobel Laureate in Economics, the subject of Sylvia Nasar’s biography. Where Erdös was impish, kind, open to all and monkishly pure, Nash was overbearing, secretive and abrasive, with a stormy marriage, an illegitimate son and several ...”