“... because The North Ship, reprinted ‘with considerable hesitation’ in 1966 and offered more as a curiosity than to be admired, adds another 30 titles to the list.) What it all boils down to, or up to, is that Larkin the thrifty now has a Collected Poems of substantial bulk.Ought we to think, though, as he generally did not, that adding means ...”

“... years around the accession of Charles I to the outbreak of fighting in 1642. ‘Cavalier’ meant more things after 1642 than before it. It was in the mid-winter of 1641-42, in the crisis which turned on the king’s entry into the House of Commons in an attempt to seize five of its leading members, that it acquired political connotations. That ...”

“... and solemn symbolic enigmas, while Lewis Carroll poked gnomic fun at various targets in a rather more comic spirit. Riddling is a ‘trope of obfuscation’, Cook writes: ‘Doubly damned’. Her mission is twofold: first, to rehabilitate the riddle as a significant literary device, and second, to bring back the discipline of rhetoric. Reading closely for ...”

“... colour to these international styles, Ibsen managed to carve out a market for himself. Feeling more established, he married again and had another child. Once more, his course seemed set. And once more, he surprised everyone around him. He had become restless again, and did not believe ...”

“... as Swift’s Gulliver, living uneasily among the giants of Brobdingnag, finds ‘that my Sense was more acute in Proportion to my Littleness’, so in it-narratives the diminutive size and inconsequential status of the speaker allow a sharper view of human conduct and motivation than would otherwise emerge.The idea behind much of the critical attention paid to ...”

“... originally had another meaning. ‘Vagina’ meant the scabbard of a sword. I could not hate this more. The idea that it is a protective casing for a phallic weapon feels like a betrayal of what the vagina can do. Anyone who has seen or experienced the vagina expanding to allow an infant’s skull to pass through it can testify to its wonder.‘As women have ...”

“... any for about two years. I’d been writing stories, and I didn’t know if I’d ever write any more poems. I felt writing poetry might have passed out of my life. I lamented that, but it didn’t seem as if there was anything I could consciously do about it. Then I went from Syracuse, New York out to Washington State, with the intention of writing ...”

“... puts off all foreign support, and stands alone, that I see him to be strong and to prevail,’ or more creepily, ‘The only gift is a portion of thyself. Thou must bleed for me.’ The strong long to create the strong whom they know will destroy them: that is their weakness.When Bloom is seen as a child of Emerson and Whitman, the anxiety of influence begins ...”

“... associated: he would have been a great Irish poet even if he had not become supranational, more universal than that description suggests. The new nation also needed a great Irish painter, and Jack Yeats, brother of the more famous W.B., was seen to supply the need. The question whether he was just a great Irish ...”

“... vulgar. Bruce McFarlane, a fellow of All Souls before becoming the history tutor at Magdalen, knew more about the late Middle Ages than anyone alive, but could not translate any of his knowledge into books. Sparrow might have liked to be such a man, but he wasn’t Lowe describes visiting him in old age. He got Lowe to line up his complete works on a shelf by ...”

“... than agent, but is capable of wishing to escape from his sufferings. Then there are two of him, or more – a development which expresses his dilemma and attempted escape. The character lacks character, very often, and exercises a negative capability which turns these novels towards the condition of poetry. This is what Goethe, in Wilhelm Meister, thought all ...”

“... with mine. ‘Technique is important in poetry only so that it may reveal the supernatural.’ Or, more unevasively still: ‘As Patrick read his verso I would listen not for the rhythm, nor for the obvious sense in the lines, but for some superior sense beyond the actual words, some harmonics, communicating a sacred message or incantation delighting me with ...”

“... the language itself frustrates by appealing, implicitly and inevitably, to English-language-users more worldly-wise than we are. If this is true (it is a matter seldom canvassed), out of many possibilities that spring to mind two should be noticed: first, we may conceive of a language – as it might be Russian, or even American English – that is less ...”

“... Hollinghurst’s fondness for triads of the adjective-adjective-noun kind, on the model of Thomas Gray’s ‘mute inglorious Milton’. Nothing is more lyrically English than this smooth cluster, and Hollinghurst’s ability to spool these triplets throughout the book is marvellous. But they appear so often that ...”

“... it was known), keeping its regulars up till dawn with his brilliant conversation. There was a lot more to him than one-liners and limericks; and if one thing emerges from the thickets of Stephen Lloyd’s excessively long biography, it is that Lambert had one of the finest musical minds of his generation and a critical faculty second to almost none. During ...”