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“... Mrs Thatcher herself was dumped in 1990 and the personal style of government transformed by John Major, there has yet – apart from a very different attitude towards Europe – been any significant change in the conduct of economic and social policy or in the intention behind it. The collection of books and papers under review, most of which ...”

“... Like many others I have been puzzled by the reaction to John Smith’s death. It was reported as though it were at least that of a prime minister, and his funeral was, as the BBC noted, in effect a state funeral. The decision of both the BBC and ITV to double the ordinary length of their evening news broadcasts on the day of his death could be put down to the social democratish inclinations of the programmers, but the speed with which the coverage had to be assembled suggests that it was more instinctive ...”

“... Before 1922 Hugh MacDiarmid did not exist. And only Christopher Murray Grieve would have dared to invent him. Alan Bold’s valuable biography points out that when the 30-year-old Grieve began to write in the Scottish Chapbook under the pseudonym ‘M’Diarmid’, he was already editing the magazine under his own name, reviewing for it as ‘Martin Gillespie’, and employing himself as its Advertising Manager (and occasional contributor), ‘A ...”

“... Sydney Smith and William Burke lived at the same time and in the same country: but at opposite ends of the spectrum of class, ends which rarely met, except in court. Such people were strangers to one another, foreigners, and could hate and suspect one another in the style that has been reserved for foreigners. Smith and Burke lived for a while in the same place, Edinburgh – the city of Calvin and caller air, of metaphysics and foul smells, according to Smith, who claimed, in a typical tease, that he had to detach a passer-by ‘blown flat against my door’ by the prevailing winds, and ‘black in the face ...”

“... of a sailing ship on the rough sea coming suddenly alive and sucking in the children?’ Stevie Smith asked, reviewing C.S. Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader in 1952. She liked depictions of people who disappeared into the objects of their gaze; a couple of years earlier, her poem ‘Deeply Morbid’ told the story of Joan, an office girl who goes to ...”

“... Richard Perceval Graves. It takes over where the author’s father, Robert’s younger brother John Graves, left off. John, who died in 1980, had been described by Robert as a ‘typically good pupil of a typically good school’ (to which he returned as teacher); he had for long contemplated the composition of a book ...”

“... by unseen feet, and ghosts returnGently at twilight, gently go at dawn,The sad intangible who grieve and yearn;When the familiar scene is suddenly strangeOr the well known is what we have yet to learn,And two worlds meet, and intersect, and changeIt’s as if Eliot’s and de la Mare’s poetic worlds were themselves being shown to ...”

“... is often (considerable) loss in translation, but it’s not automatic or universal, and we do grieve over losses that are trivial, or are not losses at all, just differences. Not every turn of phrase or implication is a treasure in itself. The trick would be to name the losses where they occur and to say why they matter. There is a moving case of ...”

“... John Keats​ went walking in the Lake District in June 1818. It was the first decent summer since the eruption of an Indonesian volcano three years before had tipped postwar Europe into a crisis of failed harvests, mass hunger and widespread social unrest. In Britain, Lord Liverpool’s government had suspended Habeas Corpus; Luddite organisers, revolutionary Spenceans and radical journalists had been arrested and tried (with mixed results); the Peterloo Massacre and the repressive ‘Six Acts’ lay just ahead ...”

“... out herds bred over centuries in Wales. Small farmers, whelped on Common Market subsidies and John Constable idylls, were being priced out of existence by agribusiness and Tesco. In time, the three of us – Karl, Seamus and me – decided to go out there partly to see what we could see but also as a way of spending time in company with people who shared ...”

“... confides to her his planned 1941 secret meeting with Churchill off the Atlantic coast, and grieve with Eleanor that she was left in the dark. We live through the tragedy of Missy’s nervous breakdown, stroke and exit from the White House, and disapprove of Roosevelt’s withdrawal from her pain. We wonder whether Eleanor consummated her love affair ...”

“... complaining of an inferiority complex only to be told after his first session: ‘I’m sorry, Mr Smith, you just are inferior.’ While the private thoughts of the patient can always be neutralised – if inelegantly and at the expense of the truth – through interpretative deferral (‘How interesting that you should notice that I smell’), the private ...”

“... of his uncle being a farm-labourer, or the blighted life of the intelligent, radical cobbler John Antell who married into the family. Instead, Hardy exaggerates the scale of the Rockhampton cottage where he was born, his father’s status in the social scale (he attributes his comparative lack of success in the building business to his being by nature ...”

“... was an art critic and a poet. His poem ‘Exile’ began: I knew if you had died that I should grieve Yet I found my heart wishing you were dead. This found echoes in an untitled poem by Beckett, written first in French: I would like my love to die and the rain to be falling on the graveyard and on me walking the streets mourning the first and last to ...”

“... rehearsal. Ellington had never before performed ‘God Bless America’ (famously recorded by Kate Smith in 1939) and would never repeat this airing. Why did he offer it at Fargo?If you accept Ellington’s truncated ‘God Bless America’ as a delayed coda to ‘St Louis Blues’, it introduces the idea of producing multicultural medleys for regions in ...”