“... he negotiated a contract with Bernard Lintot (who was hoping to buy himself a poet who could rival John Dryden in merit and popularity) for a translation of Homer. This was probably the best deal ever struck by an English poet. The fee for the copyright combined with income from the sale of subscription copies of the Iliad made Pope around £5000. That was an ...”

“... and rule-governed, then the fact that I can’t read Treasure Island without visualising Long John Silver as a one-legged version of my grandmother is of interest only to my psychotherapist and myself. Richards’s thought here is bedevilled by the word ‘experience’, which tempts us to model non-sensory activities on sensory ones, as though reading a ...”

“... scientists of the 16th and 17th centuries – prominent among them Queen Elizabeth’s surgeon, John Banister, as well as Francis Bacon, Sir Kenelm Digby and Robert Boyle. Mummy continued to be dispensed well into the 18th century, when Robert James’s Pharmacopeia Universalis (1747) advised: Mummy resolves coagulated Blood, and is said to be effectual in ...”

“... This​ book is a departure from John Carey’s normal mode, much more intently introductory than anything else he has written in a long and distinguished career. A Little History of Poetry canters from Gilgamesh and Homer to Mary Oliver and Les Murray in three hundred pages with a breezy sense of mission, assuming in the reader no previous acquaintance with the subject (‘Confessional poetry is poetry that reveals personal confidences, especially relating to mental illness and hospitalisation’) or indeed with other sorts of knowledge that might be thought fairly general (‘Totalitarian regimes seek to control every aspect of life, including writing ...”

“... of worship. Tenebrae reflected the view (of Louis Martz and others) that the religious verse of Donne and Herbert had its roots in Catholic manuals of devotion. In the late 1990s – just when literary critics were becoming excited by the radical voices of the English Civil War – Hill moved into the political ferment of the mid-17th century. The civic ...”

“... isn’t the first fictional character to train for a supernaturally revealed task. The hero of John Irving’s novel A Prayer for Owen Meany, for instance, must master a particular basketball shot in order to fulfil his destiny by saving a group of children. It may be that the literary form best suited to dramatising forks in the road, paths taken and not ...”

“... in this volume was altered substantially, the differences are slight. The annotation supplied by John Woolford, Daniel Karlin and Joseph Phelan is, as always with a Longman edition, very full: it is especially detailed about the Brownings’ life together. It is good to see Donne’s influence on Browning being fully ...”

“... the 20th century was Modernism’s rediscovery of ‘difficult’ poetry, mainly as practised by Donne and other Metaphysicals. This happened despite the fact that Shakespeare’s obscurities are often very different from those of the Metaphysicals, and he may actually be trying to find a way of articulating subtle and inward states of mind without their ...”

“... Early English imaginative writers seemed able to absorb the disparity relatively calmly: both Donne, in his ‘Sapho to Philaenis’ (1633), and Pope, in ‘Sappho to Phaon’ (1712), for example, presented Sappho as bisexual. But later, more prudish commentators were disturbed by the whole messy situation. Uncomfortable in particular with the ...”

“... the history of literature: Chaucer conversing with Dante, Shakespeare with Marlowe, Herbert with Donne, Austen with Thackeray, the Brownings with each other – and now, somewhere, we might add, Bishop with Moore and Lowell. It eliminates nothing that literature confronts – ‘deaths, deaths and sicknesses’, all the flowing and flown knowledge – but it ...”

“... Civil War begun and world war on the horizon, the distinguished Scottish scholar and editor of Donne, H.J.C. Grierson, gave a series of lectures on Milton and Wordsworth, which began by addressing the attacks on Milton that T.S. Eliot and his acolytes were mounting. The revival of interest in metaphysical poetry, which Grierson had done so much to ...”

“... was a tough-minded drive to find mechanical explanations. When England’s greatest living poet, John Milton, wanted to explain why we are as we are, he retold the ancient story of Adam’s sin and consequent expulsion from the Garden of Eden. When Alexander Pope wrote his Essay on Man in the following century he took care to parallel his work with ...”

“... articulate. Biographers don’t forget the history of himself that Dryden was to have given John Aubrey, but that he never gave. Dryden adapted Shakespeare, out of confidence and from a sense of necessity. I have chosen Hamlet as a point of comparison between them – a comparison, after all, provoked by Dryden himself – for a reason best given by ...”

“... creative impulse), it was not out of the desire to register the world around him. His friend John le Gay Brereton could see the importance of Henry Lawson. Brennan couldn’t. He had no interest in the bush, the Labour movement or Australian nationalism. In the Australian Nineties, a period which self-consciously but justifiably felt itself to be alive ...”

“... refreshing: ‘A Cross swaying to and fro, a Christ with jerking limbs hanging onto it, a gaping John and a Madonna who in effect consists of a tangled clump of wool threads’. He does not wonder why such a completely unresolved drawing was preserved – unless it was by Michelangelo, in which case it would have been treasured as evidence of his tormented ...”