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“... thing. Especially since those two relatively recent novels – Cotters’ England (1966) and Miss Herbert (the Suburban Wife) (1976) – contain extremely important analyses of post-war Britain, address the subject of sexual politics at a profound level, and have been largely ignored in comparison with far lesser novels such as Doris Lessing’s The Golden ...”

“... undergraduate studying English at Edinburgh University around 1930 when the influence of Professor Herbert Grierson was so potent. Under that influence, and in response to the impact of Eliot, MacLean became for a time a Donne-worshipper. He also wrote English poems in the style of Eliot and Pound, particularly the Pound of ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’. One can ...”

“... born into poverty in rural Somerset, had created the Transport and General Workers Union; and Herbert Morrison, the shop assistant straight out of Mr Polly, had risen to influence through local government in London, including the leadership of the London County Council. The later decline in the authority of trade unionists in Parliament was to have ...”

“... was ignored, seems to come up like a ghost at the feast throughout this remarkable book. Just as Robert Maxwell was officially declared unfit to run a public company before he was allowed to take over and rob the biggest printing company in the country, so Roland ‘Tiny’ Rowland, before he and his company Lonrho were allowed to take over the Observer and ...”

“... On the evening of 15 February 1957, the New York Times correspondent Herbert Matthews stepped into a jeep with some anti-government activists and went to meet the young Fidel Castro in the Sierra Maestra. Castro was supposed to be dead: sailing from Mexico a few months earlier, he had arrived on the coast of Oriente province with 82 men, and was immediately bombarded by coastguard vessels and army aircraft ...”

“... grain of the language is often a smoother, less arresting version of that of Edwin Muir or George Herbert. It’s hard to believe most of these poems were written in the last quarter-century. One distinguished contemporary poet scowled when I told him I was reading Jennings’s Collected Poems: ‘Life’s too short.’ As I read, though, I was sustained not ...”

“... Robert Fergusson died in Edinburgh’s Bedlam on 17 October 1774. He was 24 years old. He had been admitted to the asylum three months before, against his will, because his mother could no longer look after him. Having been persuaded by some friends that he was being taken out in a sedan chair to visit another acquaintance, he was conveyed instead to a cell in the asylum, a sepulchrous building abutting the old city wall ...”

“... to me a litmus paper of the genuine’), Auden (‘the greatest of my contemporaries’), George Herbert, Vaughan, Crabbe, Hopkins, Whitman, Campion, Morris, Christina Rossetti, John Crowe Ransom, Wyndham Lewis, Louis MacNeice, Stevie Smith. I would think a life of diverse affections could be made upon such affiliations. But Grigson seems to need to be ...”

“... at the gate’. Aldington and H.D. had liked to imagine that their marriage resembled that of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but it’s rare for two poets to have a happy marriage. He tried to justify his actions by reproaching H.D., telling her that what he perceived as her ‘ardour for perfection’ was making her deeply unhappy; he told her ...”

“... the military side of the invasion (though not the political) looked to Simpson’s BBC colleague Robert Fox, among others, to have been too carefully prepared an operation for that to be the case. Secondly, and quite contrary to the general belief, Simpson holds that Iraq was never a suitable case for treatment by economic sanctions. This is important ...”

“... Well, I could never write a verse, ­– could you?Let’s to the Prado and make the most of time.Robert Browning, ‘How It Strikes a Contemporary’The world has an established place for poems about paintings – sometimes you wonder if there was ever a poet who didn’t write one – but, oddly, the poem-painting relationship doesn’t seem to be reversible ...”

“... Sociobiology has had its home principally in the United States rather than in the land of Herbert Spencer, and Professor E.O. Wilson of Harvard, author of Sociobiology the New Synthesis, is now the leading figure in this new, or revived, philosophy of human nature. The founding father was Konrad Lorenz, who followed the vastly popular King Solomon’s ...”

“... many devoted friends at Harvard (as Millier notes), ranging from Octavio Paz to William Alfred and Robert Fitzgerald, and in her writing courses found students whom she admired and liked, both male and female. She also found a new person to love, Alice Methfessel, the administrative assistant at Kirkland House (the student residence where Bishop was first ...”

“... and justly; but in this same Introduction, he fails to do justice to another Carlyle scholar, Herbert Grierson. In 1930, Grierson gave a lecture entitled ‘Carlyle and Hitler’, in which he seemed to find some resemblance between the anti-democratic attitudes of the two men. To think this is to misread him, however. ...”

“... on the destination we travel to.’ What counts is staying power, and this he has in spades. A.P. Herbert, the Punch contributor chosen by Ian Hamilton to represent the ‘something-about-next-to-nothing school’ in the Penguin Book of 20th-Century Essays, could just about manage three pages on bathrooms. De Botton sustains his thoughts ‘On the Country and ...”