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“... the water supply in 1955, the year when the book began to write itself. It was in that year that Richard Hoggart completed The Uses of Literacy, though thanks to the tribulations of libel law it wasn’t published until 1957; that Ian Watt was giving final form to the book that became The Rise of the Novel, again published in 1957; and that Raymond ...”

“... read Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe (1682), with its delicate possible parallel between the dunce writer Richard Flecknoe and Charles II, but not Nero the Second. Charles can’t be twinned with Flecknoe as straightforwardly as George I with Nero but, as Keymer shows, it’s the non-straightforwardness of the parallel – the way it’s built up from detail to ...”

“... defying body and convention to ‘soar like an eagle’ in the way of the blessed inebriate in Richard Thompson’s song ‘God Loves a Drunk’ (‘His shouts and his curses they are just hymns and praises/To kick-start his mind now and then’)? Timothy Neat writes not in order to leave his late friend in a heap on the floor, least of all the floor of ...”

“... Alfred Kroeber’s explanation for the abolition of taboos: cultural fatigue. According to Raymond Williams’s classic account, the notion of ‘culture’ (which was invented only at the end of the 18th century) achieved its influence and intellectual authority by setting itself up as a standard against which capitalist or industrial modernity could be ...”

“... Who now, other than historians of modern France, remembers Richard Cobb? Cobb’s Wikipedia entry – the canonical index of posterity’s interest – measures three lines; by contrast, Hugh Trevor-Roper, his principal addressee in this collection, gets five thousand words. Yet Cobb, who died in 1996, was not only a historian of acknowledged genius ...”

“... Haskell on controversies about the transition from Late Roman to Early Christian art; Bernard Williams, in a wonderful and unsummarisable essay called ‘Naive and Sentimental Opera Lovers’, writes about distinctions in operatic taste, the sources of the power of opera, what it is to be an opera lover, and Berlin’s responses to opera in ...”

“... monotonously small follower Philip Larkin’, etc? If he despises William Carlos Williams, Dylan Thomas, Gertrude Stein, Robert Lowell, Charles Olson, Edith Sitwell, Augustus John and Ted Hughes, what’s the merit of vulgarity and spleen? Many trees have been cut down to make the paper on which Grigson has spewed his contempt for ...”

“... his tink tink, tink tinkbespeaking a familiarity with the science of iron-carbon alloysthe Chinese developed alongside the Dao,he’s believed to anticipate the licethat will infest his nest by stitching intoits brush-pile the egg sacs of lice-eating spiders.This ‘time-release packet’ is just one example of what Muldoon describes elsewhere in the collection as ‘future-proofing’ (‘Once we relied on a hoard//of seed that had been sacked/and saved ...”

“... a peasant-servant repeats the central plot-device of Godwin’s allegory of class conflict, Caleb Williams. These early reviewers simplified the book they had to deal with. Baldick’s more careful comparison of Mary Shelley’s protagonists with those of any model in the 1790s shows that her sympathies are unusually evenly distributed, her message complex ...”

“... a Bible on matters linguistic. Nor, one imagines, could a post-Willinsky scholar do what Raymond Williams did in the Fifties and base a major intellectual enterprise on the confident assumption that OED represents ‘a systematic, reliable and comprehensive history of the English vocabulary’ – raw lexical material. In the Foreword of Keywords ...”

“... and a mere two sentences in the joint communiqué.’ I can shed some light here. The late Philip Williams, when researching his massive biography of Gaitskell, an unparalleled picture of the postwar Labour Party, interviewed Norman Brook, the cabinet secretary who accompanied Attlee to Washington. The visit, Williams told ...”

“... Mary Peters; from subsidiary groupings such as Actors for Europe, which included Arthur Lowe and Richard Briers, and Writers for Europe, whose membership ranged from Agatha Christie to Tom Stoppard. Ogres such as Benn, Paisley and Powell were no match for these recruits. The 1975 referendum has attracted the attention of various political ...”

“... have been and are many philosophers of a wide range of political shadings (Michael Oakeshott, Richard Rorty, Bernard Williams, Martha Nussbaum) who breathe the air of the tower far more easily than they do that of the stove. Maybe if this tendency continues, Montaigne will one day come to seem as significant a figure in ...”

“... debt, friendship, family and inheritance. Starting from the breakdown of medieval landholding in Richard II and Henry IV, Maus ends, after two fine chapters on The Merchant of Venice, with an account of the ‘vagabond kings’ of Henry VI Part II and King Lear. The transition from feudalism to capitalism, from Richard II ...”

“... Richard Rorty has made us familiar with the distinction between two sorts of philosophy, which he calls ‘systematic’ and (I think infelicitously) ‘edifying’. The first sticks to the central epistemological tradition, which assumes that it can deal systematically and progressively with reality; the second is essentially of the periphery, and its exponents are pragmatical opponents of the institutional tradition ...”