“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”