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“... by a series of genuinely powerful arguments, to scorn. Some may be surprised to learn that C.S. Lewis, of all people, put the case against Vives with especial effectiveness. The essentialists would have us believe, he wrote, that if we strip off from Virgil his Roman imperialism, from Sidney his code of honour, from Lucretius his Epicurean philosophy, and ...”

“... of 1835). The desire for one was certainly there. Beating Grimm very slightly to the punch, Thomas Keightley brought out his Fairy Mythology in 1828; Margaret Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, which appeared nearly a century later, had a similar aim. Since then, books and articles about the ‘fairy faith’ have continued to appear. But ...”

“... Not every well-bred Scots lady can identify a greasy Syriac palimpsest at breakfast, but Agnes Lewis had no doubts. In 1894 the rescued document created much excitement, not least because it seemed to show Joseph as the natural father of Jesus. Agnes tried to explain this away, but was not too embarrassed; like her sister, Maggie Gibson, she was enjoying ...”

“... Its most memorable expression was a poem ‘The Deluge’, by the nationalist leader Saunders Lewis, which began: The tramway climbs from Merthyr to Dowlais, Slime of a snail on a heap of slag. That industrial landscape or wasteland was accurately observed, but the sting was the judgment: ‘here once was Wales.’ It is then unsurprising that the ...”

“... of civil servants. Ministerial resignations for failures of departmental policy, such as Sir Thomas Dugdale’s in 1954 over the Crichel Down affair or Lord Carrington’s in 1982 after the invasion of the Falkland Islands, don’t happen very often. More recently, Michael Howard’s reluctance as home secretary to accept blame for the failures of the ...”

“... have often wished to brutalise the notion that poetry is not for everybody. Here’s Cecil Day Lewis in 1947, trying to get them young: ‘Poetry won’t help you to get ahead in life.’ This is the sort of thing superior persons say, or men who think the main object in life is to make money. Poetry, they imply, is all very well for highbrows and people ...”

“... the proposal to establish an Anglo-Saxon-based school of English at Oxford, the moral philosopher Thomas Case protested that ‘an English School will grow up, nourishing our language not from the humanity of the Greeks and Romans, but from the savagery of the Goths and Anglo-Saxons. We are about to reverse the Renaissance.’ Not for the first time, an ...”

“... that needs to be borne in mind. There are a lot of 16th-century sonnets. But, if we except Sir Thomas Wyatt’s magnificent though sometimes stumbling work, many of these are paper poems, manifestations of a particular moment in Tudor court culture. Some of this sonnet-writing, Sidney’s in particular, is highly accomplished; some is haunting, such as ...”

“... electoral and Parliamentary auditors. None of this was very surprising. But those who read Sir Lewis Namier and his disciples without also reading Burke were sometimes left with the impression that he had been a contorted, noisy figure whose reputation badly needed cutting down to size. The revival in serious Burke studies in recent decades owes something ...”

“... full-frontal psychopathology of anti-semitism. They probably accept, as true for that decade, Sir Lewis Namier’s vision of the politics of the 1760s as dominated by clique and pique rather than by constitutional principle, but would hesitate about his overarching behavioural conservatism. Call this open-mindedness, pussy-footing or Vicar of Bravery, it has ...”

“... on the margin, is far from being a stranger to mainstream anthologies, while Basil Bunting, Dylan Thomas, Edwin Morgan, R.S. Thomas, Iain Crichton Smith, Thom Gunn, Hugh MacDiarmid and Norman MacCaig are unassailably part of our consciousness of the poetic landscape. Auden and MacNeice, too, though the omission in both ...”

“... or to The Archers. The self-awareness of the novel in regard to its public is curiously subtle. Thomas Mann and Arnold Bennett would have taken it for granted, like Scott, that though their reconstructions might not appeal to everyone, they would be read by a complete cross-section of the reading public, from the discerning connoisseur to those who were ...”

“... of dinosaur skeletons, the newly installed carapace of a giant spider crab and the remnants of Lewis Carroll’s dodo – is a lump of grey rock, a little bigger than a house brick. I often go to look at this nondescript piece of 66-million-year-old sediment, straining to see the thin, pale stripe that runs through its middle, a record of the impact that ...”

“... of Romanticism, the neglect of Lecky and new-wave social science, the scatological treatment of Thomas Carlyle. Other omissions may be added. Frederic Maitland is not very well realised, which is strange given the historians (Kenyon among them) who believe in his greatness. Maitland’s relationship with Leslie Stephen and avid interest in Meredith’s ...”

“... Reading the English translations of the Psalms – reading Tyndale, Coverdale, Milton, Sidney, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Francis Bacon, Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw and the inspired committee-work of the Authorised Version – one immediately notices that the biblical texts are really quite vile, and that the poets’ ‘personal agendas’ seem almost without ...”