“... in the depths of memory, and I found myself thinking of Theophila, a very long poem published by Edward Benlowes in 1652. Theophila is written in three-line stanzas, a pentameter, a tetrameter and an alexandrine, all on a single rhyme. The judgment on Theophila quoted above comes from The Oxford History of English Literature, which rightly regards Benlowes ...”

“... of them in the Archives of the Royal Irish Academy: an Irish countess, a Russian princess, a young woman from Co. Cork and her lady’s maid. They come to us from the journals that the young woman, Katherine Wilmot, kept during her travels on the Continent in 1801-3 and to Russia from 1805 to 1807, and sent home to her ...”

“... a nature a little lower than that of angels and assumed by far higher than they,’ according to Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition (1759). In short, was Swift a monster, as Samuel Johnson nearly said: ‘The greatest difficulty that occurs, in analysing his character, is to discover by what depravity of intellect he took delight in ...”

“... father agrees. After all, you are a respected figure. Your experiment goes something like this. A young girl, Sarah Nelmes, is a patient of yours and is known to be infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). You draw a syringe full of blood from her arm and go back to James Phipps to make two superficial cuts in his skin, which are about ...”

“... chairpersons of Hong Kong’s Democratic Party: Albert Ho Chun-yan, who offered legal aid to Edward Snowden when he was hiding out in Hong Kong in 2013; and Emily Lau Wai-hing, who in 1991 became the first woman to be elected to Hong Kong’s Legislative Council. They urged Taiwan not to trust Beijing’s promises, but their real worry was Hong ...”

“... a last free table before queues started. Dinner 8.30 chez Jean-Claude and Annick. Other guest a young poet, Jacques Lèvre, whom Jean-Claude thinks very promising. Showed me four poems of his in a review: the first and last reminded me at once of Follain, who it turned out Jean-Claude had never read. Shy, unassuming and friendly, Lèvre reminded me of one ...”

“... in the California Democratic primary in 1968. The immediate chances of a third brother, Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, were scuppered after the Chappaquiddick incident in 1969 – when a young female aide drowned in a car he drove off a bridge. However, when it was revealed that the ...”

“... Stafford’s Queen Emma and Queen Edith (1997), which brackets Emma with her successor, wife of Edward ‘the Confessor’. Stafford’s earlier Queens, Concubines and Dowagers (1983) took a broader view, as does Lisa Hilton’s Queens Consort: England’s Medieval Queens (2008). If one were to pick out another powerful ruler too often forgotten, one might ...”

“... gang, headed by a rascally rector, who murdered a Leicestershire magnate and robbed one of Edward I’s trailbaston judges, before going on to commit numerous robberies in Lincolnshire. The gang were brothers, well-connected enough to buy pardons from the Crown, or to atone by serving in the King’s Army, but fatally drawn to highway robbery. The ...”

“... cast light on civilisation by comparing what happens when blood is sold and when it is donated. Edward Bristow’s subject, likewise, is a service which may be either donated or traded – or obtained under duress. His exploration of it takes him into unfamiliar recesses of public and private depravity, and shines a torch into the laundry room of ...”

“... and that across the river was a Boston which still called itself ‘the Athens of America’. Edward Cummings, the father, was a man of modern outlook, if only in certain respects. A sociologist who had been at Toynbee Hall as well as at the universities of Paris and Berlin, he knew about strikes and lock-outs, arbitration, penal codes, and indeed all ...”

“... exciting new music in Europe is the newly recovered work of the 17th and 18th centuries, played by young performers on instruments of the period. The most profound and audacious new writing is found in the historical novels of Grass, Pynchon, Garcia Marquez, and their followers, writers who explore the present through detailed excavations of the ...”

“... Obviously, a President such as Clinton cannot possibly copy that method. Incontrovertibly young, more of an errant son than a father figure, Clinton needs to be persuasive in the role of a ‘hands-on’ managerial President, who knows everything that government is doing (which is impossible), and who accepts responsibility for all its significant ...”

“... Berwickshire in August 1914, during which someone reads aloud from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, then appearing in the Egoist, and war is declared. It describes two successive changings of the literary guard: from the Great Victorians to the Great Moderns (Hardy, James, Conrad, Kipling, Wells), and from the Great Moderns to really modern Modernism ...”

“... expect very little from books with titles like The Fortunate Traveller (Derek Walcott), Sun Poem (Edward Kamau Brathwaite), Aegean Islands (Bernard Spencer) and Sun the First (Odysseus Elytis). Walcott confronts this prejudice in his new volume. Dividing his poems into those set in exile in the ‘North’ (the United States and Britain) and those of the ...”