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“... Cowper came to me and said: “O that I were insane always. I will never rest. Can you not make me truly insane? … You retain health and yet are as mad as any of us all – mad as a refuge from unbelief – Bacon, Newton and Locke.’ ” Thus William Blake’s memo of a ghostly visitation from William Cowper ...”

“... one does the letters of Madame de Sevigné, Madame du Deffand, Edward Fitzgerald – or indeed of William Cowper, the new edition of whose Letters and Prose Writings has just reached its fourth volume. Yet Hardy’s letters are admirable in their way, laconic and to the point, written with his eye on the spirit-level, as becomes the son of a small ...”

“... the spell, not of Pope or of any of the other primarily satirical authors of the century, but of William Cowper. A pasticheur of late-Augustan styles, I too have sung the sofa and the hare, Made nightmare ride upon a private air And hearths, extinguished, send a chill for miles. This ‘Homage’ ends with reflections which one can see, in ...”

“... B. Priestley, G. Wilson Knight, George Steiner, Angus Wilson) have been booming the name of John Cowper Powys for many years, outraged that other big guns will not join the salute. In the first number of the Powys Review, in 1977, George Steiner blamed Dr Leavis for praising Theodore Francis Powys above John Cowper, thus ...”

“... though less widely recorded, among others. What there was, according to Favret, was the poet William Cowper, publishing The Task in 1785 in the aftermath of the American War of Independence, which must be considered a global war even if it did not involve the sheer manpower of the campaigns against revolutionary and Napoleonic France. ...”

“... To write well about William Blake you need to be enthusiastic, aphoristic and contrary. It also helps to be slightly mad. You need to begin your book with a paragraph like this: When Blake spoke the first word of the 19th century there was no one to hear it, and now that his message, the message of emancipation from reality through the ‘shaping spirit of imagination’, has penetrated the world, and is slowly remaking it, few are conscious of the first utterer, in modern times, of the message with which all are familiar ...”

“... works on Hindu law and Charles Wilkins’s pioneering translation of the Bhagavad-Gita. When Sir William Jones, the inspirational instigator of Indo-European studies, arrived in Bengal as a judge, Hastings was one of his strongest supporters. Though it has long been fashionable to denigrate such work as being Orientalist, it’s difficult to find anything in ...”

“... is also attributed to Telford, though with the active collaboration of the more senior engineer William Jessop and the ironmaster William Hazledine. It consists of an iron trough supported on arched iron ribs and carried more than 120 feet above the Dee Valley on delicately tapered stone piers. It is dramatically ...”

“... of masons, the spider’s web lace displaced beside silent bobbins in such a home as that of William Cowper in Olney, betoken craft workers whose skills lifted them above the level of ordinary labourers. While examples of their handiwork remain, little is left save statistics to tell the tale of the stone-picking, the acorn-gathering, the ...”

“... rightly a frogmarch, maybe even a toad’s march, to Pseud’s Corner even to bring up the name of William Blake, but historians of English madness, including Porter, help us see the Blakean contradictions: all those élitist mouthings-off about Reason, all that hypochondriacal cool, all those dancing lessons, all culminating, two hundred years later, in ...”

“... in his head, which he feared might in time prove an apoplexy; as in fine it did and killed him’. William Cowper congratulated a friend on contracting the disorder, ‘because it seems to promise us that we shall keep you long’. Hester Piozzi’s husband grew worried and alarmed if his gout did not return regularly. Besides, gout was very much a mark ...”

“... benefits cheat.’ Alison ends up in prison. ‘The Winshaw Prize’ opens with a quote from William Cowper which reminds us that satire can be ‘either grave or gay’ – Number 11 is mostly grave – but goes on to bemoan satire’s ineffectiveness: ‘What vice has it subdued? whose heart reclaim’d/By rigour? or whom laughed into ...”

“... form of religious dogma (although I do remember with some affection what it was like to do so).’ William Cowper wrote: ‘Blind unbelief is sure to err.’ But so is blind belief. Standing where he does, MacCulloch is aware of the importance of understanding his subject for those who are not religious: ‘The decay of actual religious practice in Europe ...”

“... and the show opened with a huge nuclear explosion, following which, in the words of the producer William Donaldson, the audience was treated to a whole evening’s worth of ‘terrible gloomy stuff – the punchline of every sketch was people dying.’ Nonetheless, it was undoubtedly a strong influence on Peter Cook (one of the original cast members) and the ...”