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“... It’s as though he has decided to make himself the subject of a dramatic monologue. As Helen Vendler notes in her fine introduction to this edition, ‘he was – as he must have known – the first American poet to whom the discourse of the basic sciences was entirely natural,’ and that discourse brings with it a vision of the natural as a sign ...”

“... 18 he was caught stealing money from his Owens College friends, in an attempt to support Marianne Helen (Nell) Harrison, a 17-year-old alcoholic prostitute with whom he had fallen in love. A month in prison was followed by a year in the United States, a stab at journalism, a return to England, a move to London, a reunion with Nell, and a decision to write ...”

“... alone are certain good.’ And then I began to wonder where I could find such a book. Helen Vendler’s long study of the art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, is that purely aesthetic study of poetic language in action, and it begins appropriately with this statement: ‘I assume that a poem is not an essay, and that its paraphrasable prepositional ...”

“... Darkened with Celts’ and Saxons’ blood’, composed in an idiom which melds Yeats and Edward Thomas. Times, or places, have changed since the poet of ‘Bone Dreams’ pushed ‘past philology and kennings’ in a retaliatory ‘invasion of England’. Still more fascinating is the case of a writer who leaves England for America ...”

“... the West Coast of Scotland in their tens of thousands. Hugh Sr’s parents – Hugh O’Hagan and Helen McQuade – may have seen the trouble coming, for they departed County Tyrone a few years before the Famine began, and set up a hide and skin-dealing concern in the High Street. All of the women worked, mostly as seamstresses, slipper-makers, steam-loom ...”

“... radical practice, an obsessive labour, a way of life’. Her artless title is taken from a letter Helen Lowe-Porter wrote to Thomas Mann after she became his English translator. She was, she said later, an ‘unknown instrument … which … must … serve him to change the garment of his art into a better one which might ...”

“... that Lois herself had been a high-school supporter of the Socialist Party of America under Norman Thomas and perhaps, at university, an admirer of the young militants whose star rose in the party during the early 1930s. Lois sends a funny letter to her family in December 1936, responding to ‘Mother’s crack that she was sorry I was a ...”

“... thought to have been named by Walter Scott after the song of that title by the Irish Romantic poet Thomas Moore. This was then the only place I knew of so named. Next came a beautiful lake at Killarney which turned out to be called the Meeting of the Waters; again, it’s believed, at Scott’s suggestion. I decided to start collecting these ‘meetings’, so ...”

“... it is all dressed up, most real when it’s at its most sham self. The architect and pamphleteer Thomas ‘Victorian’ Harris fretted about the 19th century’s inability to create an architecture peculiar to itself, its age, its engineering, its steam power and its myriad inventions, all the while failing to see that the architecture he craved was being ...”

“... much evidence had to be given about Tenducci’s sexual nature, including from a servant quoted by Helen Berry in The Castrato and His Wife (2012). He was a witness as the surgeon Pietro Massi castrated Tenducci: I clearly saw that … [the surgeon] made two Incisions between the Thighs, and the Body next the Groin, and when these two Incisions were made I ...”

“... for ‘cheating a Derbyshire gentleman with counters instead of silver’, and a burglar, Thomas Mason (‘alias Humming Tom’), who had broken into the house of Sir Walter Cope. There was the woman from Finsbury accused of ‘cozening Elizabeth Barnes of certain money for a little powder in a paper’: she had promised that Elizabeth ‘should have ...”

“... or insides Dickinson wrote are inscribed with the name of one of her regular correspondents – Helen Hunt Jackson, Dr J.G. Holland or his wife, Mrs Holland – making one feel that for Dickinson the decision about whether or not to send a letter she’d written could be almost as problematic as the decision about whether or not to publish her ...”

“... were the ever receding vistas of The Anathemata (1952), his epic about the matter of Britain. As Thomas Dilworth documented in his earlier David Jones in the Great War (2012), Jones saw more active service than any other British writer, all of it as a private, and outlived nearly all his contemporaries, with the exception of Robert Graves, born in the same ...”

“... to the magnitude of the earth’. In her more recent Faber Book of Contemporary American Poetry, Helen Vendler has made a comparable point, arguing that geographically and topographically there must be many American poetries: ‘There will be no American landscape that does not speak in words as well as in line and colour.’ I am hoping to suggest that ...”

“... to make anachronistic judgments and ask anachronistic questions is hard to avoid. Why didn’t Thomas Mann come out? Why didn’t Forster publish Maurice in 1914, when he wrote it? Why didn’t the American critic F.O. Matthiessen write a history of gay American writing? How come Lionel Trilling didn’t realise that Forster was gay? And why are gay lives ...”