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“... and other activities used to concentrate an audience by figuring in a non-literary context, and Blake or Emily Dickinson used religion, as they used the context of childhood responses, to appeal directly to an audience over the head, as it were, of literature. Their communication seems to short-circuit it. The tactic was understood and developed by the ...”

“... Fortunately, he discovered in himself another talent, and under the pen-name of ‘Nicholas Blake’ published a series of commercially successful detective stories, the classic genteel-class literary genre of the interwar period. At this point, Day-Lewis seemed even more of a whole-hogger for ‘the Revolution’ than Auden and Spender (MacNeice never ...”

“... as Richard III. Garrick was elected to the Club in 1773; the playwrights Oliver Goldsmith and George Colman were already members and Richard Brinsley Sheridan would be admitted a few years later. The Club wasn’t just full of luvvies; it began with quite serious purposes and ambitions. With his rancorous first biographer, John Hawkins (Johnson coined the ...”

“... fictions. They do not fit easily with the mainstream English novel from Austen and Thackeray to George Eliot and Henry James. The Brontës are a long way from the genial, civilised, ironic tones of that tradition. Perhaps this is partly because they were only half English, and their father came from a country whose literature was always more Gothic or ...”

“... that the young Day Lewis ‘played off’ not just against Auden, but also against Donne, George Herbert, Hopkins, Yeats, Hardy, Matthew Arnold and Frost). You might think of this as a talent for adaptability. In The Buried Day Day Lewis is frank about the ‘incipient hero-worship’ of his youth, and recalls that ‘I possessed certain qualities ...”

“... of genuinely new material while arguing for a volcanic adult sexuality in Tennyson who was, like Blake or Ginsberg, a poet for the wild Sixties. A provocative spin was given to the debate by Robert Bernard Martin in his Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart (1980). Martin traced the Tennysonian gloom back to the fear of stigmatising illness. Young Alfred’s formative ...”

“... whole exceedingly trusting. A number of the earlier ones were painters, such as Spencer Stanhope, George Howard, Val Prinsep, G.P. Boyce and G.F. Watts, for whom Webb created an unusual house on the Isle of Wight, now destroyed. Victorian painters made good money, and Webb was the main pioneer of the studio house, which involved linking small rooms with a ...”

“... first wife, Jean Stafford, a weird word or two to a former lover, Gertrude Buckman, a sentence to George Santayana and two sentences to William Carlos Williams. Of these communications, those to Bishop, Buckman and Williams are certified as ‘written during an acute manic episode’, but the others are not. A few days later everything again becomes manic for ...”

“... cosmic of questions. From Matthew Arnold’s portentous idiom of sweetness and light to George Steiner’s reverent talk of artefacts as real presences, art is a domain of displaced transcendence. It is the one remaining intimation of immortality for those who mourn the spiritual barbarisms of modernity, but are modern enough themselves to feel ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... But he had a practitioner’s acquaintance with the English poetic tradition, and not only with Blake, whom he edited, and Spenser and Shakespeare, whom he greatly admired. (For example, seeking a stanza form suitable for his elegy on Robert Gregory, he silently adopted that used by Cowley three hundred years earlier in his verses on the death of William ...”

“... After all, the press will always trumpet a failure. For every Penkovsky or Gordievsky there is a Blake, a Philby or a Prime. Schellenberg and the Sicherheitsdienst humiliated MI6 in 1939 when they lured two British agents across the Dutch border and used their victory as propaganda. But the British, by turning instead of shooting German agents, won the more ...”

“... National Libraries Week. Larkin wrote back saying that the letter reminded him of the story of Sir George Sitwell being stopped by someone selling flags in aid of National Self-Denial Week: ‘For some of us,’ said Sir George, ‘every week is self-denial week.’ ‘I feel,’ wrote Larkin, ‘exactly the same about ...”

“... of Theodore Roosevelt – thought well of him. He got on well with his colleagues too, apart from George Santayana, whose philosophy he dismissed as ‘the perfection of rottenness’ – a very Jamesian put down. He was far from being a recluse. Like his father, he travelled much in Europe, but unlike his father he left his family at home. (Hence the size of ...”

“... These six volumes are crammed with comédie humaine and the parliamentary puppetry that seems, as Blake said, something other than human life. There’s also a masterly volume of summary and analysis by the editor, David Fisher, who dislikes paragraphs and believes in calling a bastard a bastard. Inevitably, such an exhaustive work of reference answers ...”