“... 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 ...”

“... young Dennis Hopper and Harry Dean Stanton) in a boxing match against another prisoner, Dragline (George Kennedy), through his dogged willingness to offer up his body as a punchbag. It’s one of Newman’s best performances and was forced out of him by Rosenberg, who realised he had to ‘disturb him a little’. In one scene, he told him: ‘Shit, we’ve ...”

“... jump-cuts of a career begun as a teenager when Moorcock hacked out Tarzan Adventures, Sexton Blake thrillers and camp-fire yarns of the purple sage. ‘At the age of 17, sitting in a dark little room in South London in the late 1950s,’ he wrote in the introduction to Tales from the Texas Woods, ‘I earned a wonderful living writing about an Arizona ...”

“... be heard in the speeches of Satan and, such as they are, of God in Paradise Lost, which induced Blake to say that Milton was of the Devil’s party and Emerson to say, after Blake, that ‘if I am the Devil’s child I will live then from the Devil’; it can be heard more genially in the verbal duels of Hotspur and ...”

“... read it with pleasure, and Henry Fuseli lectured on it at the Royal Academy and persuaded William Blake to take an interest. George Eliot admired its style (‘the most un-German of all German books that I have ever read’), de Quincey translated it, and Matthew Arnold opened a poem with the lines ‘One morn as through ...”

“... to the undermining of Britishness. One reason for this, as the Party’s historian Robert Blake comments, is that Tories have always tended towards English nationalism, enjoying electoral paramountcy in the Southern counties, but possessed of far less secure roots in the North or in Wales or in Scotland. Predictably, therefore, the recent protracted ...”

“... with the DNB’, ‘Dissenters and “Antiquity” ’ and ‘Disaffection of the Dissenters under George III’. The book adds up to the biography of a lost strain of English thought, lost not because it has been ignored but because it has been flattened, because we have learned to treat Dissent as if we knew what it was – either because we celebrate it as ...”

“... who parodies the Martian approach so successfully that you wonder if it has quite enough to it. Blake Morrison’s ‘Xerox’ is a poem to be memorised now if you did not cut it out of the paper and keep it, but he already had a reputation so anyone might have printed it. Fiona Pitt-Kethley, however, was little known until the LRB started printing her ...”

“... mansion. The Clyde rises and falls only a few yards from the castle’s back door, and in 1668 Sir George Maxwell sold eighteen acres of riparian land to the city of Glasgow, which thought it was a useful site for a harbour. Shoals and shallows above that point in the river made Glasgow inaccessible to sea-going ships; they usually transferred their cargoes at ...”

“... all of its fleshly temptations and attendant despairs, is an obvious incitement to grace; thus, George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh, and Rock Against Racism, and Live Aid, and Farm Aid, and Red Wedge, and Rock the Vote, and Live 8, Coldplay, U2, the late and the later John Lennon, and perhaps almost as many good causes as there are actors. It can ...”

“... sole name or in partnership, Anna Barbauld, Joel Barlow, Thomas Beddoes, William Beckford, William Blake (as an illustrator), S.T. Coleridge, William Cowper, Erasmus Darwin, Humphry Davy, Maria Edgeworth, Olaudah Equiano, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Fuseli, William Godwin, Mary Hays, William Hazlitt, Thomas Malthus, Thomas Paine, Richard Price, Joseph ...”

“... of a nation.’ But nationality still mattered: Seamus Heaney’s reaction to his inclusion in Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion’s 1982 Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry was ‘My passport’s green.’ Heaney, preoccupied with ‘the government of the tongue’, was drawn into the arguments about cultural identity, language, gender and ...”

“... Time In’) In his 1996 Everyman selection, George Walter calls this squaddie quality of absorption in the ordinary ‘his fascination with people – his democracy’. But it is not always present: it seems to come and go like a mind moving in and out of focus across all his postwar poetry-writing from ...”

“... Apprentice Mage (1997), Foster developed this thesis by exploring Yeats’s early enthusiasm for Blake, folk superstition, and that quintessence of suburban occultism, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Purgatory is able to figure as something of a climax in Volume II because the same interests continued into the 1930s. Though references to Freud and ...”

“... other than human life”.’ He takes the phrase ‘something other than human life’ from Blake, who was referring to the Houses of Parliament, and not just to their or anyone else’s thought: ‘they seem to me,’ Blake wrote, ‘to be something else besides human life.’ The Magi are our frozen thoughts, our ...”