“... 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 ...”

“... a visionary monologue notionally addressed to a love-object, though her reality is pretty foggy. John Stuart Mill read the poem attentively in preparation for a review which never appeared, although Browning did later get to see his notes and was understandably struck by one of Mill’s sharper comments: ‘The writer seems to me possessed with a more ...”

“... the Ohio Browning has met. Reviewing its first two volumes, one of its severest critics, the late John Pettigrew, found that they didn’t make him want to modify the statement that ‘there is nothing remotely like a good scholarly edition of the works.’ It was, in fact, the problems of the Ohio Browning that made the editors of the Oxford Browning turn ...”

“... because he has run out of animal comparisons. It took a while for this manner to change. King John, a bit later, has some intensities of a sort not to be found in its predecessors, but it remembers the old redundancies. Here Salisbury is protesting against the King’s decision to be crowned a second time: Therefore, to be possess’d with double ...”

“... in youth, in middle age and when old’. The young poet started poems better than anyone since Donne, but how did the poet responsible for such epochally compelling opening lines as Consider this, and in our time, As the hawk sees it or the helmeted airman: The clouds rift suddenly – look there At cigarette-end smouldering on a border At the first garden ...”

“... simply don’t know how old they are. The most complete and compendious of these scholarly works, John Burrow’s The Ages of Man (1986), reaches back through Medieval to Classical times to show how very differently existence was measured before our own pervasive if shallow mathematical and technological revolution. He reminds us that the Gospels record no ...”

“... That’s what he said without prompting, and on the Wednesday evening he had a conversation with John Barradell, the City of London’s extremely well-connected town clerk. Barradell has what you might call a leading interest in the operations of London Resilience, the set of protocols that go into action during a major emergency in the capital. At this ...”