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“... it. Or at least that is the idea. In his poem ‘Apollo and Marsyas’ the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert imagines a new sort of howl which might come out of that musical contest. The tone is cool, a little sceptical and very Polish, well aware of the nature of experiences which art can or maybe cannot encompass. At any rate, the kind of art that knows it is ...”

“... revolution of its own? In a controversial book, George III, Lord North and the People (1949), Herbert Butterfield argued that this moment came a decade before the French Revolution, in 1779-80. These years witnessed a movement for parliamentary reform and a popular clamour against Catholic relief, which culminated in the Gordon Riots, the largest popular ...”

“... that lurked behind political rhetoric, or ‘flapdoodle’ as he called it. Cowling’s mentor, Herbert Butterfield, was Namier’s fiercest critic. In George III and the Historians (1957), Butterfield punctured Namierite reductiveness: ‘Human beings are the carriers of ideas as well as the repositories of vested interests.’ Although Cowling believed ...”

“... another group of rebels dragged the archbishop of Canterbury, Simon of Sudbury, and the treasurer, Robert Hales, out of the Tower of London and beheaded them on Tower Hill. On 15 June the rebels and the king met again, this time at Smithfield. Their leader, Wat Tyler, failed to doff his cap, instead taking the king’s arm and shaking it roughly in ...”

“... should be, that influence has occasioned remarkably little anxiety in the younger poets, such as Robert Crawford, Liz Lochead, W.N. Herbert, Kathleen Jamie and Jackie Kay, who have learned from him. In Edwin Morgan: Inventions of Modernity, Colin Nicholson tries to account for his many-sided subject by examining him facet ...”

“... self-interested – rather than statesmanlike – motivations of 18th-century politicians, while Herbert Butterfield pointed out the present-minded distortions of the past found in grand constitutional narratives. Later, K.B. McFarlane applied Namier’s insights to the 15th century, diverting attention from the constitution to the political elite and the ...”

“... Morris scholar John Drinkwater, as though to oppose it would be derisive of the common mood. Robert Byron, less precious than usual, regretted that ‘according to official and ecclesiastical standards … a bit of the old Roman wall is of more importance than Nash’s Regent Street, and one ruined pointed arch than all Wren’s churches put ...”

“... than others, however much we may protest that they are merely different? For instance, does Robert Lowell’s Life Studies intrigue us more than, say, Tony Harrison’s family reminiscences in Continuous? If so, is it because Lowell’s technique is more sophisticated and fluid than Harrison’s vigorously clanking sonnet sequence in which the rhymes ...”

“... representative of the Inner Voice in ‘The Function of Criticism’. Above all, he was papabile. Herbert Read remarked that ‘by the time he was given the Criterion Eliot was our undisputed leader.’ There is a good account of his complex early relationships with London writers in Erik Svarny’s The Men of 1914. One can hardly miss a certain ...”

“... on 22 October 4004 bc. Nor were ideas of ‘development’ new in themselves, and writers such as Robert Chambers, in his bestseller of the 1840s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, could run together an eclectic mix of geology, natural history and philosophical speculation to propose some kind of ‘evolutionary’ story. After 1859, Darwin’s name ...”

“... Forum, Jacobs had contrasted ‘Olympian’ town planners such as New York’s quango despot Robert Moses, addicted to models and graphics, seldom getting out of their cars, with ‘pavement-pounders’ like Bacon and the shopping mall designer Victor Gruen, who knew Philadelphia well and explored it on foot. But when Bacon took her to a ‘bad ...”

“... savant to prompt such thoughts: there was, for example, the other giant of evolutionism, Herbert Spencer, piling up the successive volumes of the Synthetic Philosophy, topped off with the filing-cabinet of The Data of Ethics. But Spencer, though a recluse in later years, was a larger figure in himself, a quirky, querulous, assertively self-made ...”

“... a design in any material.’ This is a passage quoted with approval by Benedict Read’s father, Herbert Read, in championing the art of Henry Moore and the ideal of direct carving which has had so potent an influence on 20th-century sculpture. It is certainly the case that many prominent sculptors from Thorvaldsen to Rodin were not ‘master craftsmen’ at ...”

“... no word for understatement. She won prizes but less international recognition than her warm friend Robert Lowell, who consistently celebrated her: Dear Elizabeth, Half New-Englander, half fugitive Nova Scotian, wholly Atlantic sea-board – Unable to settle anywhere, or live Our usual roaring sublime. Elizabeth Bishop certainly never roared. In this ...”

“... yet consigned to the skip two excellent earlier Lives, A.N. Wilson’s Hilaire Belloc (1984) and Robert Speaight’s The Life of Hilaire Belloc (1957). If a debunker were needed for this wittily bellicose (‘Bellocose’, Wilson suggests) Catholic author of more than 150 publications (which smacks of thraldom to the work ethic some call the Protestant ...”