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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... idea of literature, and a peculiar division of labour between writer and reader. Their author, William Gaddis, who won the National Book Award with JR, might actually have felt short-changed by the accolade of the imprint, to judge by a riff in JR deploring the way ‘longer works of fiction [are] now dismissed as classics and … largely unread due to the ...”

“... Neal Ascherson, Mary Beard, Jonathan Coe, Tom Crewe, William Davies, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Lorna Finlayson, Daniel Finn, Katrina Forrester, Jeremy Harding, Daisy Hildyard, Colin Kidd, James Meek, Ferdinand Mount, Jan-Werner Müller, Jonathan Parry, David RuncimanNeal Ascherson‘On​ 17 June poor France fell. That day, as we trudged past Greenwich … a tug skipper yelled gaily across the water: “Now we know where we are! No more bloody allies!”’ The writer A ...”

“... while the related verb paillarder is glossed as ‘to haunt bawdie howses’ and ‘to bitch-hunt it’. The other word used is ‘adultères’. Mountjoy was at this time unmarried (Marie Mountjoy had died in 1606, and his subsequent marriage to Isabel d’Est was not until 1615), so the primary sense of ‘adultery’ is not strictly ...”

“... moles. This seems to me wrong-headed in several different ways. The key judgment is surely that of William Strang, the Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office, in a paper of May 1943: We need Russian collaboration. The conclusion of the Anglo-Soviet Treaty marks our decision that this must be our policy … even if fears that Russia lay a ‘heavy ...”

“... they were brought up, sons of a bucket-maker? There is much incidental play with a local poet – William Westlake – who lived, went mad and died in the early 19th century and who seems to be based on John Clare, an artist tragically unable to integrate his peasant heritage with his London authorial self. Lavish stretches of Westlake verse are invented to ...”

“... appetite for ever further tit-bits about the ‘Cambridge Comintern’. No sooner was the long hunt for the ‘third man’ settled (with the defection of Philby) than a further breathless search for the ‘fourth man’ began. Finally Blunt was run down. Almost immediately we are off on the chase for the fifth man (Rees?) and perhaps even a sixth (Sir ...”