“... line. As usual, Dryden was repeating what others had said in Oldham’s lifetime, including Sir William Soame, a poetical gentleman now chiefly remembered perhaps for having translated Boileau’s Art Poétique with Dryden’s help. Oldham was sensitive on the point, answered Soame in the ‘Advertisement’ to Some New Pieces (1681) and set about refuting ...”

“... poets: he is an admirer and a translator (one can be both, you know) of Coleridge and Keats and Byron, but he seems to be particularly fond of William Blake, a poet I find crude and clumsy. Poetically Blake is as naive as he is primitive as a draughtsman: an illustrator of Biblical themes who entertains metaphysical ...”

“... a very strange poet. The usual account of this strangeness, until fairly recently, was to say as William Empson did in the introduction to the selection of Coleridge’s poems he edited with David Pirie: ‘Coleridge wrote only a few very good poems.’ Debate has turned essentially on the question of which those poems were. Defending the edition he was by ...”

“... unstable mother, he was born with a club foot, which always made him self-conscious,’ he says of Byron; and of Dickinson, no less winningly: ‘She was reclusive, tended to wear white clothing, which was thought odd, and scarcely left her bedroom in her later years.’ Such things strike a whimsical note, but usually Carey’s humour has a flintier edge. It ...”

“... the first English printed book) was The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers, published by William Caxton in 1477, which grouped a miscellany of moral sayings under authorial headings. Many of the ‘quotations’ gathered in this ramshackle way would have made their ‘authors’ wince: Homer is said to have written ‘A good man is bettir thanne alle ...”

“... is for professional posers and the in-house magazine-stand offers antique cigarettes and copies of William Burroughs’s Ghosts of Chance. Upstairs, there are quilted blackboard panels behind each bed and the colour television is hidden inside a thin cupboard with a cut-out Osiris eye. Light is hosed from a surgical tube and is so feeble that it’s almost ...”

“... morals and his versification in a series of spirited letters to the Gentleman’s Magazine. Byron swam against a tide of Romantic scorn, issuing his own poetic commandments in Don Juan: ‘Thou shalt believe in Milton, Dryden, Pope;/Thou shalt not set up Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey.’ And in the 20th century, especially since the Second World War, a ...”

“... even howling at deaths. Not just symbols of human virtue, but superior sensibilities (as the young Byron insisted in his epitaph to Boatswain, his Newfoundland dog and ‘one friend’), dogs became fit matter for poetry. Although these new ways of anthropomorphising animals were evidence of a more sceptical or secular mentality – ‘anthropomorphism’ had ...”

“... population, and in which death would be, if not eliminated, at least indefinitely postponed. William Godwin pointed to the enormous agricultural capacity of the world’s yet unexploited land: mind would triumph over matter, and ‘there will be neither disease, anguish, melancholy, nor resentment.’ It was better that there should be more people rather ...”

“... and stewing; they are sweating all over; they are absolutely pining and dying for a Plot!’ So William Cobbett wrote to Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt in 1816. He did not exaggerate. The verb ‘foment’ might have been invented to describe the activities of Lords Sidmouth and Castlereagh and their spymasters in Bow Street during the turbulent 1810s. Seldom in ...”

“... as relatively standard cases of the urge to ‘be a man’. Leave it to the genteel types – William James being another and later example – to mistake manhood for the capacity to endure pre-arranged physical hardship. Their version, no doubt, of the English public school. It will be obvious that Leverenz likes to stay close to home – as with ...”

“... In his introduction to a revised 1997 edition of the novel, he concluded: It was said of Lord Byron that he was more proud of his Norman ancestors who had accompanied William the Conqueror in the invasion of England than of having written famed works. The name de Burun, not yet Anglicised, was inscribed in the Domesday ...”

“... not her real forename; ‘Crafts’ may be a tribute to Ellen Crafts, who with her husband, William, made a daring escape from slavery in 1848 disguised as a white male. Whoever ‘Hannah’ was, she lives now in the pages of her book, and we need to look within the text to find out who and what she was: and since it has many autobiographical ...”

“... detailed notes of sources do not specify, that more than accounts for the hysterical fury of William Randolph Hearst, seen by almost everybody (including himself) as the original of Kane. Imagine sitting through the fictional-factual story of your life waiting to see if the film will tell the world that you died pronouncing the pet name you used for your ...”

“... him it was ‘the most ecstatic reaction I have seen to any book I have known anything about’. William Empson welcomed ‘a grand biography’; Cyril Connolly, though naturally disappointed not to find himself mentioned, nevertheless recognised something ‘truly masterly’; and Frank Kermode wrote that Ellmann’s account would ‘fix Joyce’s image for ...”