“... right idea when he said that Milton was of the devil’s party, possibly without knowing it, and Shelley was right to describe Satan in Paradise Lost as ‘a moral being … far superior to his God’. Empson sometimes hints at his own credo: man should not seek transcendence but ‘conciliation with a secular universe’. From his Chinese days he retained ...”

“... social policies he recommended, Enlightened thinkers and their Romantic allies despised him. Shelley wrote that Malthus was ‘the apostle of the rich’, whose writings were ‘calculated to lull the oppressors of mankind into a security of everlasting triumph’. To Southey, Malthus was a voider of ‘menstrual pollution’, who had written ‘the ...”

“... Jocelyn Brooke was born 30 November 1908, third child and second son of Henry Brooke and his wife Mary, née Turner, the youngest of the family by ten years or more. Both his grandfathers had been wine merchants, also his father, who had started life as a solicitor. Brooke’s elder brother, after ten years as a regular officer in the Royal East Kent ...”

“... to mobilise all his literary resources – above all his knowledge of the Bible and of Keats and Shelley – to express what to many seemed inexpressible; later in the year, after meeting Sassoon, he found a way of allowing the same urge to transform his Swinburnian poetic idiom into something radically different.One can hear a proleptic echo of this ...”

“... older, married man, the musicologist Percy Buck. Life had in the meantime not dealt so kindly with Mary Kathleen Macrory Ackland – universally known as Molly. Robert Ackland’s charisma had always had a punitive edge: he insisted that his daughter accompany him on his rounds in the surgical wards; and then afterwards, according to Warner, to the brothel he ...”

“... with London topography, has been wilfully set aside. The legends of Chatterton and Rimbaud, of Shelley, their association with Old St Pancras, are forgotten. Dun recognises that pastoral invocations of the Fleet River, its swimmers, cattle, fishermen, are no more than nostalgic engravings hung on the locked church in the teeth of the coming storm. ‘The ...”

“... Potter). This was part of a cultural revival. Union Jacks began to appear in the oddest places: on Mary Quant miniskirts and draped round the shoulders of Pete Townshend (Patriots is always keen to assert the world-beating quality of British pop). Weight seizes on this, arguing that such ‘promiscuous use’ of the national flag was ‘the most visible sign ...”

“... mainly Yeats, but also Joyce, who had died as the poem was being composed, as well as Milton and Shelley. As he was drafting the poem, Eliot was more tentative than he would be later about the identity of ‘the familiar compound ghost’, worried, as he told Hayward, that ‘the visionary figure … will no doubt be identified by some readers with Yeats ...”

“... timetable of the Resurrection would just have suited the programme-makers; the angel appearing to Mary Magdalene in the garden was probably Alan Titchmarsh. 17 February. Though she complains about having to put on so much make-up and even more about the bore of taking it all off, Maggie Smith seems to enjoy transforming herself into Miss Shepherd, today ...”

“... elation created by the new generation in Dublin which Roy Foster describes in Vivid Faces (2015). Mary Colum, for example, later wrote about her time teaching at Pearse’s school:The teaching staff was young, and we seemed, all of us, to be travelling on the same road … Looking back, it seems incredible that so many young people were eager to devote their ...”