“... but as neurosis, emotional repression, the inability to love: there is much more D.H. Lawrence and Blake in them than there is Mr Marx. And of course a lot of Freud, mostly not in particulars but in the diffusely Freudian cast of mind – the ‘climate of opinion’, in Auden’s famous phrase – which, contemplating the whole range of human damage, finds ...”

“... reading on a working day, so he climbed over the high wall round Burghley Park. Like the young Blake seeing a tree full of angels in the fields at Peckham Rye, this moment is part of literary folklore: ‘What with reading the book,’ Clare wrote in his autobiography, ‘and beholding the beauties of artful nature in the park, I got into a strain of ...”

“... And heard in the churchyard a biblical echo. “In the year that King Uzziah died I saw also the Lord …”’ If her lines are unusually memorable, it is because they scan: first the sea, then the Bible, then the whole of English literature.It was the weight of influence that sat so heavily on the Leavis generation. A teacher, for those symbolic eleven ...”

“... in his father’s arms. Fairies also played an important role in the personal cosmos of William Blake, who wrote about them as elemental spirits in Milton and Jerusalem and repeatedly painted them. The exploration of the fairy theme in art and literature intended for grown-ups was accompanied by a renewal of interest in the folklore itself. It was Walter ...”

“... and beautifully is in the order of poetry,’ the Greenock-born journalist and novelist George Blake wrote. ‘The pride of a seafaring nation and of a shipbuilding race were utterly engaged. This mass of metal had become the symbol of national self-respect. To leave her unfinished would have been as unthinkable as, shall we say, to scuttle half the ...”