“... socks, Woodbines – the mood is ominous. The poem ends with a reference to the death of Edward Thomas. Lewis himself was killed in 1944.Sarah Moss’s new novel is set in a lochside cabin park in the Trossachs. The poem behind its title is William Watson’s ‘The Ballad of Semmerwater’, about a city lost beneath a lake. But Lewis’s poem seems truer ...”

“... fomented the Phoenix Park murders of Chief Secretary Lord Frederick Cavendish and Under-Secretary Thomas Burke, who had in reality been killed (on 6 May 1882) by Parnell’s bitter enemies the Invincibles. The Times in 1887 had made many other charges under the heady influence of a group of clever and unscrupulous young Irish Unionists who had captured the ...”

“... at all. And she is good at describing that great tradition of our literature, from Caedman to R.S. Thomas, which transforms the parochial into the universal. A highly literate Church has not limited itself to the Word, but has scribbled its brilliant way into drama, poetry, science and fiction. Miss Drabble’s map is sign-posted all over with cloisters and ...”

“... and John Whitworth; from Aidan Carl Mathews (another besides ‘Severances’); from Thomas Shapcott (who may be Australian – we aren’t told) and from Peter Bland (probably, by the same token, a New Zealander); and from U. A. Fanthorpe (two). One of the Fanthorpe poems gets, reasonably enough, the third prize of £500, Bland gets ...”

“... West Palm Beach – is its seventh resting point.The owner and mastermind of the collection is Thomas Kaplan, a silver magnate and wildcat aficionado who must have seen the absurdity of ‘owning’ an Old Master. Or a tiger, come to that. He wants to do something that doesn’t involve tethering pictures to any particular place or institution, and so he ...”

“... What a pleasure​ to return to Thomas Hardy. For about a hundred pages. Then the torment begins, and we’re not even halfway through. From now on each turn of the page will expose the reader to greater unhappiness. There’s a moment in The Return of the Native where the main character, Clym, already deeply troubled by his mother’s mysterious death, goes out of his way to find a little boy who may be able to tell him exactly what happened ...”

“... curated by Martin Postle and Robin Simon. It is a magnificent show, the first on this scale for more than thirty years. It will be at Cardiff until 26 October, and it is accompanied by a sumptuous catalogue, the fullest, most faithfully reproduced collection of colour reproductions of Wilson’s painting there will ever be in book form, accompanied by a ...”

“... publication of Pynchon’s immense Gravity’s Rainbow, during which time exegesis has continued more or less unabated. It is accompanied by tireless speculation as to what the author could be up to next, where he was, indeed who he was. Compared with Pynchon, J.D. Salinger is a publicity-hunter. One daring scholarly conjecture, that these authors are one ...”

“... finished reading these two biographies I was very bored indeed. Almost everyone I know has had a more interesting life than Gibran; even I am having a more interesting life than he had. The biographers have done their best but I should guess that they, too, have had more interesting ...”

“... FAS, which must make any classicist look for NEFAS. It is doubtful whether any of these have done more than waste a little more public money. When these remedies fail, we get scapegoating, as illustrated by John Major’s recent assault on ‘outmoded politically correct ways of teaching’ and get quantification, in the ...”

“... feeling ran high. He swore loudly and often, devised his own peculiar costume (nautical, more or less), and wasn’t too careful about personal hygiene. No one thought he was a gentleman, a fact that didn’t trouble him in the least. His erratic behaviour eventually turned into insanity, probably resulting from syphilis caught during his rowdy years ...”

“... Time has a way​ of turning radicals into authorities. Thomas Aquinas was provocative during his lifetime because he sought to ground Christian theology in Aristotelian philosophy. Marx was exiled, Socrates poisoned. Moses Maimonides, known in the Jewish tradition by the honorific ‘Rambam’ (for Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, his real name), was celebrated centuries after his death as a towering figure in both philosophy and law, but in his own day was a controversial figure ...”

“... Another antiquary who was at Hougoumont, John Gage (1786-1842), left an account that is more personal and more chilling than Scott’s, in a journal kept during a visit that was, for him too, a first taste of foreign travel. Gage was 29 in the summer of 1815. From an old-established family of Suffolk gentry he was ...”

“... of the difficulty of translating that experience into text. The book’s three sections unfold more like a dialectical argument than a fictional narrative. If there is a story here, it’s about the limits of language.Appropriately, Goetz begins with an ellipsis (the rapid d-d-d of a drum machine firing at 150 beats per minute):… and came up to me in ...”

“... many women in famous movements) she wasn’t the first to get noticed. After two decades and four more books with small presses, Wesleyan University Press put forward a fine selected poems, Veil, in 2001. In 2009 her tenth book, Versed, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. The same things that make her work easy to recognise make ...”