“... is no smell of passion in the air. Then there are his male mentors, friends and acquaintances: William Ellery Channing; Sampson Reed (one of whose books Emerson considered the best thing since Plato in Plato’s line); Bronson Alcott (whom Emerson admired as a great prophet, and whose work is quite unreadable today); the ‘manifestly insane’ Jones Very ...”

“... by IIoyd’s One of his favourite poems, and the one he seemed to enjoying reciting the most, was Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations of Immortality’: Thou little Child, yet glorious in the might Of heaven-born freedom on thy being’s height, Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke The years to bring the inevitable yoke.Cummings tried hard to avoid the ...”

“... to be considered a star in the society of Meriton; that the ‘considerable sum’ Mrs Norris gave William Price was one pound; that Mr Woodhouse survived his daughter’s marriage, and kept her and Mr Knightley from settling at Donwell, about two years; and that the letters placed by Frank Churchill before Jane Fairfax, which she swept away unread, contained ...”

“... should say ‘witted’ criticism. Should he continue in this direction, he will soon sound like William Empson, the Keeper of the Seven Seals in this area, a great critic posing as a terrible poet, who was apparently content to commit lines such as ‘Project her no projectiles, plan nor man it.’ It is bewildering that Hill, once so richly lyrical, should ...”

“... the next flow’rs, that deck the Spring,    Bloom on my peaceful grave!Twenty-six years later, Wordsworth had a go. His rhythms were awkward and strained, and his rhymes no better, but he too was concerned with writing a melancholy ballad about the long years of confinement and the terrible end of one who had been so exalted:Hark! The death-note of the ...”

“... His discussion of it, in the chapter on ‘Justice’, is the centrepiece of his book. ‘William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll,’ the song begins, ‘with a cane that he twirled round his diamond ring finger.’ ‘William Zanzinger had 24 years/Owns a tobacco farm of six hundred acres’; Hattie Carroll ...”

“... he fit his parts into the machine.’ Or my favourite: ‘Coleridge ignited homoerotic energy in Wordsworth and Lloyd, too. His closest friends felt as if he were, during their most vital moments, inside them.’Wilson gives us no reason to trust his critical judgments, either. It is possible that if you have no sympathy for Lamb, or for people who eat ...”

“... important friends were wealthy men with a taste for the arts – his neighbour Uvedale Price, Sir William Hamilton, Britain’s ambassador at Naples, and the collector Charles Townley. By the mid-l780s Knight moved in the liberal, not to say liberated Whig circles that had Charles James Fox as a hero, and ancient Athens as an inspiration. Knight’s first ...”

“... house in suburban Cheshire, most of my pocket money went on books – Billy Bunter, Jennings, William, War Picture Library, Biggles, Arthur Ransome, bird books. In the 1950s I used to order Puffin books by post from the catalogue, the pleasure of unwrapping the parcel rivalling the discovery of a new book in a Christmas stocking. For my ninth or tenth ...”

“... heart of their union a common hankering after fame. No two figures in British literature – not Wordsworth and Coleridge, not Auden and Isherwood, not Holmes and Dr Watson either – so humanly combine a delight in the sweetmeats of being with the fears and rigours of moral enquiry. The friendship of these two was geological: the shifting plates of their ...”

“... falling into contempt with the people.’ Taxes were high and times were bad, and journalists like William Cobbett were radicalising popular opinion by lambasting ‘Old Corruption’. Parliament, Cobbett stormed, was ruining the nation it no longer represented. An oligarchy of aristocrats and financiers, having hijacked the Commons by means of electoral ...”

“... and of complaints kept at bay. Like the previous modern biographies by R. George Thomas (1985) and William Cooke (1970), but slightly more so, Wilson’s book is really the story, despite her equivocations, of Thomas’s despair; and then of the remarkable and brief late flowering and flaring of his poetry, with his untimely and now famous early death at Arras ...”

“... William Golding’s new novel, Fire Down Below is the third volume of a trilogy, the other parts being Rites of Passage and Close Quarters. The trilogy is about a voyage to Sydney in 1813, and a bald, merely literal account might run like this ... On the first page the hero appears, Edmund FitzHenry Talbot, an unformed young man of good family who is going out to help govern New South Wales in an aged line-of-battle ship, Captain Anderson commander, and who has been given a book in which to record his journey by his godfather, an influential peer ...”

“... idea is being repeated, which brings out the change of tone in this verse.Madge is reading from William Empson’s first book, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), which she refers to only as ‘the horrible ambiguity book’. Paton Walsh read English at Oxford in the 1950s, and Goldengrove is in many ways a response to the experience. Madge wants to be a ...”

“... to a fire at sea on the voyage home. More realisable and still more wildly adventurous was William Moorcroft, who trained as a doctor and became a pioneer veterinary surgeon in London, until he gambled away his capital at the races. Appointed to supervise and improve the stock of horses in British India, Moorcroft in 1810-11 and 1819-25 made two ...”