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“... rare visit to London during the war, for ‘something to go with my reptiliary – a seal pond – Christopher, wouldn’t it be fun?’ If Heathcote is fazed by the thought of further escaped inmates from my uncle’s neglected zoo, he doesn’t show it. The swans glide by; he climbs out of the mud; and looking, if possible, wilder than before, joins me on ...”

“... maligned by historians and the writers of textbook history.’ More recently, shorter lives by Christopher Wright (2005) and Jeremy Black (2020; an earlier full-scale Life was published in 2006) tell much the same story. If we look further back, we find Herbert Butterfield in George III and the Historians (1957) telling us that ‘it would be wrong … to ...”

“... these prodigious gatherings, the poetry looks svelte. Yet the 2015 Faber edition of the Poems by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue itself runs to nearly two thousand densely annotated pages. This, too, is a breathtaking achievement. Very few people will read through all these thousands of pages, and their publication risks making Eliot seem more daunting than ...”

“... In the Great War he was wounded five times, at the Battle of Loos and at the Somme. At Delville Wood he was hit in the thigh and pelvis and rolled down into a large shell-hole, where he lay for the next ten hours, alternately dosing himself with morphine and reading Aeschylus. He wrote home on 13 September 1916 that ‘the stench from the dead bodies which ...”

“... that homes for heroes meant rehousing the whole of the working class: Not brick and tile, but wood, thatch, walls of mixed Material, and buildings in plain strength fixed. ... O better this sort of shelter – And villages on the land set helter-skelter On hillsides, dotted on plains – than the too exact Straight streets of modern times, that strait and ...”

“... here is his ambition to write a new kind of English poem with what he described in his poem to Christopher Isherwood as a ‘strict and adult pen’. Elaborating on this, in his introduction to The Auden Generation, Samuel Hynes characterises the sought-after new art as follows: ‘Auden was urging a kind of writing that would be ...”

“... the grave. In some respects the most original and important contribution to Forward! is Frances Wood’s on 1964-79. The author has been a fully engaged Labour activist and conveys some of the pain and confusion which the movement suffered over devolution in the Seventies. Labour’s sketchy ‘National Plan’ had been scuppered by 1966, and its policies ...”

“... a writer. A guest list for a Features party planned in 1951 included Henry Reed, Lawrence Durrell. Christopher Fry, C. Day Lewis, Lennox Berkeley, Michael Tippett, William Walton, Laurie Lee and Stevie Smith. Until the early Fifties the BBC appeared to get a good return from its policy of patronising highbrow talent. From the inauguration of the Italia Prize ...”

“... too old for frontline duty, and soon found himself with the battalion transport in Bécourt Wood, near Albert. On 28 or 29 July, a shell exploded beside him, and he lost his memory. In the Casualty Clearing station at Corbie, he hallucinated a congregation of immense shapes in grey-white cagoules. The shapes, with their grey-whiteness and their ...”

“... of elegies for the dead interspersed with similes, and pares away almost all narrative elements. Christopher Logue’s dazzling paraphrases adopt a fragmentary form which appears to have been broken apart by the violence it represents, which is often grotesque (‘His neck was cut clean through/Except for a skein of flesh off which/His head hung down like a ...”

“... regulations of no avail as Railtrack claim public safety as a justification. If it happened to a wood that I was fond of I’d be inclined to find out the address of the local Railtrack manager, take along a chainsaw and do the same to his precious plot. 30 March. To Petersfield on a cold, blue day, the traffic thick over Hammersmith Bridge, where crowds are ...”

“... hills. This is where you find Tibbie Shiel’s Inn, where the Blackwood’s boys James Hogg and Christopher North used to come to liquefy their rhetoric. We entered from a smirr of rain, snoking for supper. It turned out supper was something that happened in the glen before 6.30 p.m. A lady in a white lab coat emerged to remind us of the fact. The phrase ...”

“... biographer to ignore ... all these sights and the garden sounds too, the hammer beating and the wood chopping, began that riot and confusion of the passions and emotions which every good biographer detests.’ There had been a number of experiments in the late 1920s and early 1930s – among them Harold Nicolson’s delightful vignettes Some People, Lytton ...”

“... enough. When W.H. Davies says he saw the wind dragging the corn by her golden hair into a dark wood, the startling and exciting information goes straight inside us. Complex reactions then occur; theorists of rhetoric can tell us how the effect is achieved; but the truth of the information is what really matters, as when Donne tells us: ’Tis the year’s ...”

“... eloquent speeches from the dock and those in the House of Commons by Burdett and Alderman Matthew Wood and Byron’s friend John Cam Hobhouse (all MPs elected from constituencies with a wide franchise), the machinations of the government were widely known. Richard Carlile, the editor of the Republican, concluded that ‘the ministers have been playing with ...”