“... poems, comic operas and humorous essays in the Ingletonian Raconteur. Revelling in the works of Blake, Ruskin and Samuel Palmer, he was inspired by the idea that ‘reality is a thing that has to be reinvented continually.’ With no family to confine him, he used school holidays to venture out. A ‘seasoned hitch-hiker’ by the age of 16, he visited the ...”

“... Also, Critchley has written more than twenty books on subjects as various as suicide and David Bowie; this must mean something. But when I began to read, I knew I was in danger, for this was Philosophy.No, I was not the right reader, then, for I am more certain of the parameters of mysticism than philosophy, at least as it is practised by those who ...”

“... his later concerns, especially when it comes to artists focused on perception and technology, from Blake and Turner to Bridget Riley and Cerith Wyn Evans. (‘The discipline of art history, born on the European continent,’ Crary remarks of the first two, ‘has never quite known what to do with these immense, idiosyncratic figures from the British ...”

“... that before being sworn in he had himself anointed with cooking oil in the biblical manner of King David. Ashcroft chose Carl Esbeck, who had directed the Center for Law and Religious Freedom run by the conservative Virginia-based Christian Legal Society, as the first chief of the department’s faith-based office. He named Eric Treene, former litigation ...”

“... to moral discourse and retaining a distinctly clerical air. The Labour guru in postwar Oxford was David Worswick, the well-known economist, not David Worick, as he appears both in the text and the index. By no stretch of the imagination can the students of T.H. Green be said to have ‘invented’ the Fabian Society ...”

“... from among the large volume of information that the police received: Jamie Acourt, Neil Acourt, David Norris and Gary Dobson. The names came from unreliable sources – an ex-girlfriend, youths with grudges against them. All four had been suspects in connection with previous acts of racial violence. Despite a barrage of teenage estate gossip with all the ...”

“... compassion for animals. Coleridge was the only writer of his time who both understood and praised Blake; he later encouraged and greatly helped professionally a Jewish scholar whom he befriended. Both in practice and in theory he moved always towards new interconnections between body and soul, life and art, morality and psychology. All these new directions ...”

“... ear for prose. Craig Raine is represented in this selection by a poem of his own and another by David Lodge, who parodies the Martian approach so successfully that you wonder if it has quite enough to it. Blake Morrison’s ‘Xerox’ is a poem to be memorised now if you did not cut it out of the paper and keep it, but ...”

“... his work, Kathleen Raine wrote, is ‘like standing under a waterfall in full spate’. Like Blake or Stanley Spencer, Redgrove was a great English visionary eccentric whose way of seeing mixed sexuality with a powerful sense of ritual. Born in Kingston upon Thames in 1932, he spent most of his boyhood in a newly built detached suburban house. Its ...”

“... matrix through which East and South see themselves. A strong but representative book like David Dabyeen’s Coolie Odyssey* will go back to The Tempest, Blake and, most evidently, Homer in an effort to come to terms with colonialism. And Derek Walcott has for some years now read ‘Iliads and ...”

“... genius of Dickens, could not have become himself in the poems without it. As with Dickens (David Copperfield, Pip, ‘George Silverman’s Explanation’) the detail in the writing has a strong diagnostic slant. Dickens’s heroes, like Lowell, are seeking to explain their present selves: but with the important difference that such explanation for ...”

“... experience from the start. Fabian of the Yard shot through a Dostoevsky filter. Sexton Blake ghosted by Jean-Paul Sartre. The ‘General Contract’ Cook called it, the vulture on the shoulder. Vulture ventriloquism. Death and poetry. Raymond doesn’t write about poetry, he is poetry. Although, like James, he’s fond of a good quotation ...”

“... crystals, beard care and curated playlists. As with the Beatles album sleeves designed by Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton, this was where art and pop first locked eyes, before deciding to move in together.Ahalf-century​ on from the band’s messy divorce, you don’t have to go searching for Beatles bumpf: it’s everywhere. They’re as much a part of ...”

“... limited’. By that time, Oborne also had access to the memo of 14 March 2002 by Sir David Manning, Blair’s foreign policy adviser, reporting to his boss on his conversations with Condoleezza Rice: ‘I said that you would not budge in your support for regime change but you had to manage a press, a Parliament and a public opinion that was very ...”

“... with the US, alert to Vietnam and the growing anti-war movement. Others invoked William Blake and Rimbaud (‘the disordering of all the senses’), Allen Ginsberg and the scary William Burroughs. All exchanged their expertise freely as they strode the fields of cool together; they were mostly kind to younger students and I admired them. I was ...”