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“... as Mrs Thatcher’s sponsors were half a century later. He still pulled strings to get his son Christopher accepted there, and wanted to do the same for his daughter Marista. When she preferred to go to St Andrews, instead of taking pride in her decision he was mortified by it. His own further education had been chosen for him by his parents. He was ...”

“... kick my boots free of ice. My housekeeper got out of bed and, wrapped in a thick shawl, put more wood on the fire. After she had put a kettle on it she helped me pull off my boots. I held up the parcelled ham and gave it to her when she reached out. She unrolled it carefully and I saw her eyes glitter when she saw what it was. She weighed it in her hands and ...”

“... on the nature of his feelings. Nor can he make sense of the enigmatic poetic off-cuts – ‘As wood-lice chew willows, So do mites bite pillows’ – that he retrieves from Cecil’s wastepaper basket. George is attached to Cecil ‘in the Cambridge way’, someone notes. When the pair sneak off to the woods for sex, the poet calls their grapplings ‘a ...”

“... territory. And indeed, in his 1862 book The Illustrated Natural History – Birds, the Rev. J.G. Wood, the David Attenborough of his day, states that the cream-coloured courser ‘seems to live chiefly in Barbary or Abyssinia’. In the late 1860s, with the publication of Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, the word ‘barbarian’ acquired a new ...”

“... paying his assistant staff) were somewhere between £10,000 and £12,000 – making him, as Christopher Tyerman calculates, ‘the equivalent of a modern millionaire’. In 1859 he might have expected to move on to the mastership of an Oxbridge college (the fellows of Trinity, Cambridge are said to have been already trembling at the uncomfortable ...”

“... contributed to the science of literary interpretation.’ That certainly seems closer to Christopher Ricks than to Geoffrey Hartman. But James doesn’t say Sainte-Beuve had a horror of science, only of hardened, inflexible science, and James’s complaint against Taine, by contrast, is that he enjoys his simplifications rather than settles for ...”

“... it in 1937 as The Unique City. More recently, both David Piper in his Companion Guide (1964) and Christopher Hibbert in Biography of a City (1969) have written with elegance and comprehension, the first closer to the form of the traditional guidebook, the second to the style of the popular historian. Yet there is still no satisfactory fusion of guide and ...”

“... material. In I iv the speaker has a vision of cruel and violent Nature: ‘And the whole little wood where I sit is a world of plunder and prey.’ The Trinity MS has ‘full of plunder and prey’, empty in comparison; the published reading strengthens both alliteration and idea (the ‘little’ wood is a microcosm of ...”

“... the 19th century as a whole. His major precursors are Quiller-Couch, Yeats, Auden, George MacBeth, Christopher Ricks and Ian Fletcher. I don’t intend a Shopper’s Guide, but I’ll start with two small complaints. Unlike Fletcher, Karlin doesn’t give explanatory notes, except for a few dialect words and phrases in foreign languages. Reading Davidson’s ...”

“... one fact which makes the case worth pursuing is the involvement of Shakespeare’s former landlord Christopher Mountjoy. There is an obvious link: like the three goldworkers, Mountjoy was French. Also like them, he lived in the Cripplegate area (though his house was within the London city walls, on respectable Silver Street, whereas the alleged fornicators ...”

“... Castle. On the cover of the recent paperback of Clark’s autobiographical Another Part of the Wood* there is a photograph of him as a little boy young enough to be in a frock, which was probably among the photographs he happened to look at through an old stereoscope, surprising himself into saying what a dear little fellow he had been. Quite ...”

“... No Australian poet before Christopher Brennan was fully conscious of the artistic problem posed by isolation from Europe, and no Australian poet since has been fully disabled by it. Brennan’s life and death dramatised the problem once and for all. It was and is a true problem, not just a difficulty. Brennan, whether he wanted to or not, lived the problem to the full, and thereby, on everybody else’s behalf, got it out into the open ...”

“... the moderation of Isaac Watts and Thomas Hardy as at least as interesting as the wildness of Christopher Smart and W.B. Yeats. I’m not sure how moderate Hardy was – an amiable re-opening of this question was the subject of the postcard from Stanford – but Watts does sound like the unanxious Calvinist, the man who has made his peace with the ...”

“... to discuss things openly with them. But Straw had a difficulty. The UK ambassador in Washington, Christopher Meyer, had already published a memoir, DC Confidential, which also dealt with the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. If Meyer had been allowed to publish on what grounds could Greenstock be stopped? Straw’s tortuous reasoning, given to the Public ...”

“... writing. As he would have wished, she puts more of an emphasis on the historical novels – Witch Wood (1927) was his favourite – and his status as a Scottish monument, a descendant of Scott and Stevenson. There’s nothing fanciful about this – Janet Adam Smith reported that Clement Attlee pointed out to her a borrowing from Kidnapped in The Thirty-Nine ...”