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“... Fortyish, leather-jacketed, sombre and Northern (‘Lots of planets have a North,’ he says), Christopher Eccleston played the Doctor as a man both hangdog and arrogant, of an age – had he been human – to have been a child when the show was first broadcast, but with a subsequent life that has shown him disappointment, including (a point somewhat ...”

“... I’s leading minister the Duke of Buckingham donned false beards, assumed the names Tom and John Smith, and journeyed to the Spanish court to woo the infanta for Charles? Incognito travel, a commonplace practice of the age, produced a succession of improbable adventures, among them (as if in compensation for the Puritan closure of the theatres) the ...”

“... another, it’s unfortunate that their own texts are sometimes careless. You don’t have to be Christopher Ricks to spot that there’s an extra word in the third line of ‘To a Mouse’, or a word missing from line 82 of ‘A Dedication to Gavin Hamilton’. Such glitches are often the result of poor proofreading, and suggest that the Canongate Burns may ...”

“... behalf of friends, who would then qualify as voters in the appropriate constituency. His brother Christopher, one of several family members roped in, expressed doubts about the ethics of purchasing property for ‘the mere purpose of giving a vote’ but the poet would have none of it. ‘I cannot but be of opinion that the feudal Power yet surviving in ...”

“... strip, The Metatemporal Detective, showing a traditional ‘hell’s kitchen’ where ‘Old Man Smith’, the piratical ruler of the underworld, lounges on a raised chair to receive his tributes. Only in the labyrinth of fiction is Moorcock recognised as king of the city. ‘The air has an amniotic taste.’ Memory is most powerfully provoked by smell and ...”

“... shillings and sixpence. Each purchaser from Browning’s stall – or from that of his publishers, Smith, Elder – was therefore paying thirty shillings, or 360 pence, i.e. 45 times the price of the original. Like a canny Victorian merchant, Browning picked up his raw material cheap abroad, manufactured it into fancy goods, and sold it at a premium in his ...”

“... public interest. In the same period one can see a parallel ambition in the attempts by Eliot and Christopher Fry to write verse drama – not altogether encouraging examples, to be sure, but animated by a similar desire to see poetry as a recognised, familiar medium for communal as well as private experience. In the 1930s, Day-Lewis and his friends had ...”

“... board under Perry Anderson. While their elders on the left – the generation of E.P. Thompson and Christopher Hill – had planted radical politics in the soil of English history, the new cohort had more cosmopolitan ambitions. They looked abroad, especially to the Continent and the likes of Lukács, Gramsci and Althusser, for remedies against what they saw ...”

“... seem to come in generational bursts). All writers on the Brontës now benefit from Margaret Smith’s magisterial – much overdue – edition of Charlotte’s extant letters, published by Oxford in three volumes between 1995 and 2004. Barker and Gordon have both made contributions to this anniversary season: Barker’s publishers have issued an updated ...”

“... their country expansiveness: I’m thinking of Norman MacCaig in his Assynt mode; Iain Crichton Smith of the Highlands; George Mackay Brown in his Orkney remoteness; and Hugh MacDiarmid, always in among the fields and dykes, metaphysical or real. None of these men gave much quarter, and, next to them, Morgan could feel hemmed in. He was Glaswegian in that ...”

“... view of the period. He might also have marked those optimistic economists such as Adam Smith, who remarked in The Wealth of Nations on ‘the universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people’. Britain around this time is portrayed by Gatrell as a chronically unsettled country. There had been two hundred sedition trials in ...”

“... profession was her voice. She was an assistant professor of oral English at Simmons, Scripps and Smith Colleges, and taught elocution and voice training for actors. Yet speech between Emily and Tom was rare. One opening for talk came when Eliot went to the US to give the Norton Lectures at Harvard in October 1932. He telephoned Hale on arrival. Fortunately ...”

“... and not the real deal. Culture of Complaint may prove to be the most influential such screed since Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism. Hughes is much funnier than Lasch, and probably happier – his strings of metaphor are evidence that the author enjoys his work. Nimble yet lunkish, his sense of humour favours sarcasm and the well-turned ...”

“... senza foco alcuno artista l’ oro Al sommo grado suo raffina e rende. (‘Only with fire can the smith shape iron’ / Form his conception into fine, dear work; / Neither, without fire, can any artist / Refine and bring gold to its highest state.’) The opening lines, with their internal rhymes, alliteration and enjambment suggest both the strenuous beating ...”

“... Starkie, too. But most, including the Beats, Bob Dylan and Dave Van Ronk, Jim Morrison and Patti Smith, took Rimbaud to be a key French import for the prosperity of imaginative dissent in their own culture, and in some cases as a fashion accessory. Easy to sneer at them, but no bad thing to bear in mind that London was the making of some of Rimbaud’s best ...”