“... that the reader is given is filtered through Miriam in a style that Sinclair, borrowing from William James, labelled ‘stream of consciousness’. Richardson loathed the term, calling it a ‘death-dealing metaphor’, but it remains an accurate description of the way in which associations of thoughts and emotions determine the movement of the ...”

“... later version ‘richer, more complex’, like Jack Stillinger and Zachary Leader; or decide, with William Empson, that it has been mangled ‘for reasons of conscience’? It is not easy to make out what Coleridge thought about the unity of the self, but surely having a sense of it is consistent with occasional changes of mind. His practice suggests that he ...”

“... just like organic viruses invading human hosts), he boards his techno-boat and sets out to hunt the hunter, ‘chumming’ the conceptual sea by tipping bucketfuls of text overboard in an attempt to lure the Ludovician near. There’s a lot of this conceptual currency going around in contemporary art schools, and to anyone familiar with the syllabuses ...”

“... English grammars were even, one might think self-defeatingly, written in Latin). William Lily’s Latin grammar, taught by royal decree in every English school for three hundred years, explained that in phrases like Rex et Regina beati, ‘the blessed King and Queen’, the adjective beati is plural (agreeing in number with Rex et Regina) and ...”

“... and that ‘’twas pastime to be bound/Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground.’ As Leigh Hunt drily noted in The Book of the Sonnet (1867), ‘thousands of nuns, there is no doubt, have fretted horribly, and do fret.’ That surely was part of Wordsworth’s point: a sonnet is not just an orderly space, but one which contains a passion or a thought ...”

“... Depending​ where you look, the William Burroughs centenary has either occasioned an outpouring of variously celebratory and carping prose, or a trickle of grudging acknowledgment in outlets thought to speak for the literary establishment. Writing on anything of passing public interest triggers an online avalanche of ad hominem posturing which quickly renders the original topic, whatever it was, numbingly opaque ...”

“... in the OED, and so offers the hope that I might have made it up – though, alas, I discover that William Gibson, father of cyberpunk, used it to describe an addiction to technology. Ah well, my usage is etymologically purer because it preserves the sense of the Greek root -laliá, meaning ‘chatter’. Shakespeare was a playwright, a word forged with ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... he wasn’t. Much has been read into Wyatt’s poetry, but it is a dangerous occupation to hunt solid fact in verse. Brigden resists the impulse, quoting liberally but rarely analysing the poetry; when she does, it is conditional analysis, done with care. There is a prose account in Nicholas Sander’s gleefully slanderous The Origins and Progress of ...”

“... are much like ourselves, only better-looking, with faster cars; people like Tom Hanks or Helen Hunt derive the major part of their appeal from what we might call their apparent ordinariness, and only occasionally, as with Jim Carrey or Robin Williams, does an actor come along who seems to have the superhuman plasticity of a cartoon. These movie ...”

“... investigation of alleged Communist infiltration of Hollywood. Embarking on an anti-Communist witch-hunt, naming the names of hidden subversives and Red sympathisers among his former friends and associates, Reagan began, as he put it, ‘to find the rest of me’. The self so felicitously discovered acted out a fantasy of martial independence – he likes the ...”

“... experiences of the First World War, was one of which writers were acutely aware. In 1926, Violet Hunt, who began to publish in the 1890s, described herself as the kind of New Woman people used to write about long ago, and her friend Rebecca West, who joined the staff of the Freewoman in 1911, as a prototype of the ‘Newest Woman’. The gap opens within The ...”

“... threatened to cut company profits. LBJ obliged, with a cynical and unjustified McCarthyite witch-hunt which destroyed Olds for ever. This was ugly work without a doubt and Caro devotes 71 pages to it, including a lengthy biography of Olds complete with details of his parents and a painstaking analysis of his prodigious journalistic output in the ...”

“... not as clearly distinguished from the ‘man who walks secure’ as it might at first appear. William Arrowsmith, who has translated Montale’s earliest books, abandons the first person plural: Don’t ask me for words that might define our formless soul, publish it in letters of fire, and set it shining, lost crocus in a dusty field. He also jettisons ...”

“... failed him.Keats spent his last weeks in England in the care of Mrs Brawne, after fleeing Leigh Hunt’s chaotic hospitality in a rage over the household’s careless treatment of a letter from his painfully beloved Fanny Brawne. But he needed to leave in order to spare her the sight of the horrors he knew were coming for him. Severn’s ...”