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“... visit to the country house on the eve of the First War, but these are presented as the memories of Hugh and Moggie, the upper-class couple who sit out the Second World War in the basement of Claridge’s. The transitions in time and the representation of memory, which are hard to bring off on the stage, are the stock-in-trade of radio, but I’m thankful now ...”

“... In​ the summer of 1849, Arthur Hugh Clough went to dinner with the writer Jane Octavia Brookfield. ‘I tried to talk with him, but he has the most peculiar manner I almost ever saw,’ she wrote to Thackeray the following day. ‘Mr Clough sat at the foot of my sofa with this keen expression of investigation, which I determined not to mind, & only thought him un-understandable ...”

“... Paris he abandoned both his mother tongue – and, with it, the Joycean extravagance of what Dylan Thomas called his ‘Sodom and Begorrah’ mode – and the brilliant procrusteanism of his avant-garde writing of the Thirties. Writing now in French, he produced the four nouvelles and the trilogy of Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, books in which he ...”

“... and the steps which it is suggested should follow from it, are quite different in the two cases. Hugh Trowell and Denis Burkitt are a distinguished physician and surgeon who have spent most of their professional lives in Africa; with T.L. Cleave and G.D. Campbell, they have probably contributed more than anyone else to our understanding of the relation ...”

“... dated to the Grand Siècle, the time of the voyages to Mughal India of François Bernier or Thomas Coryate. Distinctions between the more advanced European cultures in the volume or quality of travellers’ tales would be difficult to make for most of the modern period. In the Enlightenment, for every Cook there was a Bougainville or Georg ...”

“... enough to make the end of Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ appear like a moment’s inclemency. The poet Hugh MacDiarmid had a feeling for the freezing lives of sheep, and he resurrected, or to some extent invented, the words that would capture the rude nature of the Scottish snowstorm, calling it the ‘yowdendrift’, when snow is blown across the fields at ...”

“... the second part of a superb and definitive biography, and by these studies of Edward Gibbon, Thomas Babington Macaulay and John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, pioneer volumes in Weidenfeld and Nicolson’s new ‘Historians on Historians’ series. As their resonant names suggest, these men were the very antithesis of poor, cloistered, threadbare ...”

“... is English. And yet Williams, born in Windsor during World War Two, the son of the English actor Hugh Williams, schooled by Life and Eton, a youthful toiler for Alan Ross’s London Magazine, an erstwhile globetrotter and a lifelong London resident, seems as English as they come. (So English, in fact, that he will object that his mother is Australian.) He ...”

“... and booksellers of the second half of the century, such as Andrew Millar, William Strahan, Thomas Cadell (father and son) and George Robinson in London, and Alexander Kincaid, John Balfour, John Bell and William Creech in Edinburgh, were not ‘mechanicks’ as Strahan once complained, but collaborators in a London-Edinburgh publishing enterprise that ...”

“... was to condemn the monastic life as useless. One of Henry’s leading courtiers and fixers was Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, and he was up to his neck in dissolving monasteries, while being one of the crustiest traditionalists among the peerage. Such men could view what was happening as a structural adjustment in Church and Commonwealth, with the ...”

“... exact music’. Brown learned much from musical masters such as Tennyson, Hopkins, Eliot and Dylan Thomas, although at his best he could cut free from them and write with a plain clarity: A silent conquering army, The island dead, Column on column, each with a stone banner Raised over his head. A green wave full of fish Drifted far In wavering westering ...”

“... worthless racket. Our Lady’s Gild threw its considerable resources at the case. It appealed to Thomas Wolsey, Henry VIII’s indispensable right hand: cardinal, archbishop, lord chancellor, Wolsey was a formidable broker of power. And it also bought the services of a clever (and therefore expensive) attorney. This was ...”

“... Until the 17th century this country remained, in this respect, on the fringe of Europe. Then Thomas Gataker, who turned down the Mastership of Trinity, practised critical scholarship in his commentary on Marcus Aurelius, and John Pearson, an eminent theologian, who was successively Master of Jesus, Master of Trinity and Bishop of Chester, displayed it in ...”

“... idea that Richard was sincere in his concessions to the rebels and reluctant to withdraw them. Sir Hugh Segrave, Richard’s new treasurer, told the parliament of November 1381 that the concessions had been made under duress and the king had revoked them as soon as he could: And now the king wishes to know the will of you, my lords, prelates, lords and commons ...”

“... their friends worried that she had been bullied into it. The speakers at their memorial included Hugh Casson and David Astor. ‘Why haven’t you thrown them away?’ I asked my friend Catherine Freeman, the 87-year-old owner of the dusty folder I’ve been drawing from. ‘They will help me as I plan my own service,’ she said. I wondered if the challenge ...”