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“... by the sword, taking rhetorical risks sometimes almost as fatal (in career terms at least) as Sir Philip Sidney’s neglect of his thigh-armour at Zutphen. He is particularly good on the dangers young would-be courtiers ran into in the 1590s when the dominant literary modes for pursuing advancement shifted from love poetry and pastoral to a mock-rebellion ...”

“... One day a long while ago Philip Larkin dropped a remark in passing about the difficulties of his current private life. He made it in the form of a jokey generalisation about the impossibility of relations between men and women, and added that the women ought really to marry each other, but that would be wrong, wouldn’t it? I forgot the remark for over thirty years until I bumped into it as an observation by one of the characters in Kingsley Amis’s latest novel, Difficulties with girls ...”

“... usually makes his reader care about what he writes. ‘Care’, that is, in the sense in which Philip Larkin in his 1977 Booker speech asked of a novel: ‘If I believed it, did I care about it?’ It was hard, in this instance, to care about what happened to Trevor’s characters, or to Mantel’s. Colliding with unavoidable actualities was what seemed to ...”

“... He insists, and he has the right to insist, that he is as authentic a voice of modern Britain as Philip Larkin is. As some pages of Poetry and Metamorphosis make clear, the Britain that Tomlinson speaks for is one that most of us, gratefully or not, are ready to think defunct: the Britain of Ford Madox Ford in 1913-15, which was host to Wyndham ...”

“... into premature Wallace Stevens, as Praed’s beautiful ‘Goodnight to the Season’ is Regency Philip Larkin. But all Victorian-and-later light verse has, I think, this pragmatic tilt to the depressing, perhaps in this case from the absence of what Nabokov called ‘aesthetic bliss’, the resolute turning-away from a wild Romanticism found neither ...”

“... of Graves and Sassoon; the ‘self-hating cultural elite’ of John Osborne, Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin; the libertarian narcissism of the 1960s; Paul Watson’s 1974 BBC series about the Wilkins clan, The Family, ‘reality television’ in general and Big Brother in particular; the Bloomsburyite economist J.M. Keynes (whose name Blond revealingly ...”

“... Philip Larkin gave the name High Windows to what proved to be his last collection of verse (published in 1974, 11 years before he died). The phrase had been used as the title of one of the poems included, and also occurs at the poem’s end: the thought of high windows: The sun-comprehending glass, And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless ...”

“... passages of speech in English fiction. In his novella St Mawr (1925), a Welsh stable hand, Lewis, accompanies a rich American lady, Mrs Witt, on a horse-ride through the English countryside. Darkness has fallen and in the sky the couple can see shooting stars. Mrs Witt has been teasing Lewis about his various rural ...”

“... had studied at Cambridge, and reporting the reaction of the leading men’s rights activist Philip Davies MP, who declared the article evidence of the ‘extremist, virtue-signalling … metropolitan left-wing politically correct drivel which is so prevalent at the BBC’. The day after, the Daily Express ran a poll to find out whether its readers ...”

“... especially if we form the habit of labelling all non-Lutheran Protestantism Calvinist. Gillian Lewis, in a fine essay on Geneva, shows how short-lived were the claims of that declining and divided city to a theological and administrative sovereignty which in any case Calvin never wanted for it. Alastair Duke on the Netherlands, Henry Cohn on ...”

“... of Braudel’s other book, the celebrated Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II.1 In both works, the chronological account of what happened is left until last, coming almost as an anti-climax after a prolonged analysis of the parameters, preconditions and pressures which (according to Braudel) determined that particular ...”

“... guess who takes the lion’s share? ‘Let me stand on the rooftop of my reckoning,’ says Lewis ‘Teabag’ Miner, the narrator of Lipsyte’s second novel, Home Land (2004), ‘and shout naught but the indisputable: I did not pan out.’ The book is framed as a series of unpublished letters to Teabag’s high school alumni newsletter, chronicling ...”

“... changed his name from Elisha by deed poll. Cranborne, meanwhile, was dealing with entreaties from Lewis Namier that German Jews be let into Britain. Cranborne thought him ‘a most tiresome person . . . he is not to be trusted. We cannot say enough to Jews of this type that people do not become refugees until they leave.’ Lyttelton, on the other hand, was ...”

“... pulled in writers such as Woolf, Lawrence, Yeats, Aldous Huxley, E.M. Forster and Wyndham Lewis, but also gave Proust, Valéry, Cocteau and other European writers their first airing in English. Conservative reaction, like socialist internationalism, was distinctly un-English in its lack of provincialism. If the journal espoused an unpleasant brand of ...”

“... then slated for 2020. When he was pressed not to vote for Corbyn as leader in 2015, Clive Lewis replied: ‘It’ll be about democratising the party, handing power back to the membership and opposing austerity: why wouldn’t I back it?’ Once these goals were achieved, many expected Corbyn would sub in a more conventional politician, firmly of the ...”