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“... that Vidal had information on this subject: both Stephen Spender and John Lehmann had been told by Hugh Walpole – in identical words, apparently – of an occasion mentioned by Edel. Walpole, then young, beautiful, and awed by the Master, had offered himself to James. After a moment of hesitation, James shuddered and said: ‘This cannot be.’ Edel’s ...”

“... that Lois herself had been a high-school supporter of the Socialist Party of America under Norman Thomas and perhaps, at university, an admirer of the young militants whose star rose in the party during the early 1930s. Lois sends a funny letter to her family in December 1936, responding to ‘Mother’s crack that she was sorry I was a ...”

“... agree with such sentiments. Their book contains knowledgeable and entertaining contributions. Hugh Trevor-Roper discusses the origins of Scottish kitsch; David Cannadine the (not at all remote) origins of British royal ritual; other contributions concern British rule in India and Welsh cultural identity (treated more respectfully than Trevor-Roper treats ...”

“... the Independent Labour Party and the Communist Party; during the war he was, according to Nicklaus Thomas-Symonds, a ‘one-man opposition’ to the coalition government (Churchill called him a ‘squalid nuisance’). This didn’t dissuade Attlee from appointing him as minister of health (he also had responsibility for housing) in 1945. After resigning in ...”

“... next century, the idea of the bard became linked to Homeric epic. By 1735 the Aberdeen philosopher Thomas Blackwell was writing that Homer was a ‘stroling indigent Bard’. Robert Burns liked that idea. In ‘Love and Liberty’ a bard sings alongside prostitutes and tinkers, and pronounces himself ‘Homer like’. Burns’s footnote (Burns enjoyed ...”

“... degree to which the piece of recall failed to affect the novel in any way. Amis is mentioned in Hugh Kenner’s A Sinking Island – which is to say that like Hughes and Heaney his name appears briefly without discussion (Larkin himself gets a dismissive page or two); and they all feature as examples of what happens to a culture when it gives way to its own ...”

“... upon reading a work of criticism – perhaps because, like the natural scientists described by Thomas Kuhn, we are bound by ‘paradigms of research’ which tend to direct attention to accepted modes of expression and discovery. Some time in 1987 I happened on an issue of a literary magazine left in my house by a visiting friend. My attention was ...”

“... history of the witch-hunt begins with a series of books published nearly thirty years ago by Hugh Trevor-Roper, Alan Macfarlane, Keith Thomas and Erik Midelfort. Until very recently, however, it was the history of trials on the Continent alone that seemed a lively subject, and in 1996 Diane Purkiss could still properly ...”

“... ceremonial duties such as mounting a guard of honour for the arrival of the new governor, Hugh Foot. They also helped out in moments of difficulty, such as the emergency triggered in August 1951 by Hurricane Charlie. This was Jamaica’s greatest natural disaster of the 20th century, with 17 inches of rainfall in a few hours, gusts of 125 mph, more ...”

“... memoirs and mostly familiar to historians. Old friends include George Robertson, Joseph Mitchell, Thomas Somerville and Ramsay of Ochtertyre. The accounts are separated into themes, such as school, factory and mine, leisure, crime (though none of the memorialists claim active participation in this). The excerpts are long enough to carry the style and emphasis ...”

“... Hugh Trevor-Roper, who died in January 2003 shortly after his 89th birthday, had several of the qualities cherished in Britain’s so-called ‘national treasures’. His schoolboyish playfulness and relish of mischief never deserted him, nor did an unerring compass in matters of style, which assured an elegant, and seemingly effortless, command of language and bearing ...”

“... introduces the McKeown thesis. In his now notorious The Modern Rise of Population (1976), Thomas McKeown proposed that in countries such as Britain population growth in recent centuries followed improvements in nutrition. Central to his thesis is the notion that better food reduced the mortality from infections, notably those like tuberculosis. This ...”

“... re-appeared. In Ireland, the three ‘internationalist’ poets singled out by Samuel Beckett – Thomas MacGreevey, Denis Devlin and Brian Coffey – all stuttered to a standstill in mid-career: MacGreevey turned away from poetry altogether; Devlin never published another collection after Lough Derg and Other Poems (1946), though his best work was still to ...”

“... as the rational justification. Beatrice Webb, for example, used her diary for deep introspection. Hugh Dalton used his sometimes as a private seminar, for working out new ideas, on other occasions as a kind of mirror, in order to practise a political pose, or as a psychic release, a place to express feelings of frustration or despair. The bizarre, explosive ...”

“... are the many poems inserted in the text; the verse is sub-Shelleyan, with some influence from Thomas Moore. When the element which Bulwer has in common with Becker is abstracted, we are left with a romantic novelette of melodramatic character, spiced with a particularly mawkish kind of Evangelical Christianity. A rich young Greek, Glaucus, ‘an ...”