“... those who endure? Tomlinson’s ‘Up at La Serra’ dramatises the restricting circumstances of a young Italian poet called Paolo Bertolani,                 who had no more to offer than a sheaf of verse          in the style of Quasimodo. Bertolani has since achieved a style of his own; his most recent volume, Seina, is written in ...”

“... of a reformed sinner castigating his own erstwhile lapses’ – and variously attributed to Robert Henderson and Angus Morrison. Music Ho! is more accurately prophetic, too, than Motion allows. He deems rather improbable the hailing of Sibelius as avatar of the music of the future: yet Sibelius’s symphonic form-building is seen more clearly in its ...”

“... friend: The road to Sligo. A spring morning. 1798. Going into battle. Do you remember, James? Two young gallants with pikes across their shoulders and the Aeneid in their pockets. Everything seemed to find definition that spring – a congruence, a miraculous matching of hope and past and present and possibility. Striding across the fresh, green land. The ...”

“... apologetic) and has a personality at the centre. It has some of the qualities of George Malcolm Young’s Portrait of an Age: Victorian England – superb broken-field running and coiled argument humanised by a delight in words and conversation. It is – ironically, for Burrow is a Cantabridgian – more Young than ...”

“... that William Wordsworth thought fit to give the Great God Pan. And then he crossed over to the young United States: I mean Pan did. Suddenly he gets a new name. He becomes the Oversoul, the Aliness of everything. To this new Lucifer Gray of a Pan Whitman sings the famous ‘Song of Myself’: ‘I am All, and All is Me.’ That is: ‘I am Pan, and Pan is ...”

“... the dispute was not about the Court of Assistants. The conflict concerned the struggle of the ‘young men’ outside the Livery for constitutional and financial benefits, and culminated in the creation of the yeomanry. The Goldsmith Court Minute Book leaves no doubt as to the true nature of the episode. I suggested in my book that in the 1630s the City was ...”

“... uselessness in a ‘high-tech’ economy is by now proverbial. Clinton’s Secretary of labour Robert Reich, for example, has made an entire career out of mourning their fate, while at every turn disclaiming any intention of interfering with the divine processes of the economy – he takes it for granted, as almost everybody else does, that American ...”

“... and concerns of the near-nonsensical Cave of Spleen episode in The Rape of the Lock. The fact that Robert Southey wrote enthusiastically about Taylor in his Lives and Works of the Uneducated Poets (1831) doesn’t do much to establish the Water-Poet as an unacknowledged influence either; although he does briefly quote from Sir Gregory Nonsence, Southey is ...”

“... library. Convalescence was transformed by a gift from his cousin, a copy of The Suicide Club by Robert Louis Stevenson.These glimpses were a romance of the road. Adolfo was feeding me titbits from twice translated interviews. But his portrait of Vaes, so decisively sketched, fired my selective misreading. The fiction of our weary march is that ...”

“... of an apparently seamless whole.If time isn’t continuous, it becomes barely recognisable. In Robert Coover’s great story ‘Going for a Beer’, barely a thousand words long, the continuousness is deceptive, belonging to language and not to the experience language claims to represent. ‘He finds himself sitting in the neighbourhood bar drinking a ...”

“... work ethic imbued in him by his Orangeman father. He lost his father’s religious framework as a young man but read avidly in theology, philosophy and self-improving literature, searching for another set of values to shape his existence. He found one in the duty of work – for its own sake, but also in order to understand the underlying order of the world ...”

“... the ardent Galahad who will never take for granted that men are sometimes wicked on purpose; Robert Kee, the hot-eyed public prosecutor … When John Birt arrived at the BBC as Deputy Director-General at the end of the 1980s, apocalyptic assessments of the programme were back in fashion. According to Birt, the BBC’s Chairman, Marmaduke ...”

“... unlawful command influence on the part of Fort Carson’s commanding officer, Major-General Robert Mixon. The witness said he had overheard one colonel tell another that General Mixon was unhappy with the lenient outcomes of some recent courts martial, and that jurors who were ‘bleeding heart liberals’ had contributed to the problem. The ...”

“... reputation in such a world? How to make a medical living? A satirist advised the upwardly mobile young London physician ‘to make all the Noise and Bustle you can, to make the whole Town ring of you if possible: So that every one in it may know, that there is in Being, and here in Town too, such a Physician’. One way to make such a noise was to be seen in ...”

“... Edward Hulton, the proprietor of Picture Post, said that Cudlipp was an uncomfortable sort of young man to meet. He is a revolutionary. I don’t mean he is filled up with a stock of ballyhoo about Karl Marx, or that he believes that every Labour Party pamphlet is an addendum to the gospels. If he were, he would be just another Bloomsbury drawing-room ...”