“... with Blake and several other Romantics at the far end, going through some aspects of Arnold and Ruskin, to Pater, Yeats and Lawrence, Graves, elements of Eliot and Woolf, and down to Leavis, Dylan Thomas and then, coming towards the nearer end of the line, the dark, odd and uncouth figure of Ted Hughes. In the superb doorstop of his Collected Poems, Hughes ...”

“... is different from the last: there are fairy tales, ghost stories, autobiographies, meditations on Ruskin; the settings are boarding schools, narratology conventions, fantasy villages. Any of Byatt’s formidable novellas might have been chosen, but we are given ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye’, in which a genie, over the course of a hundred ...”

“... steps forward would take you into some infinite, radiant void. It’s easy to see why Turner told Ruskin that the skies over Thanet were the most beautiful in Europe. Thanet has two parliamentary constituencies, North Thanet and South Thanet, and a single local council, also called Thanet. Otherwise ‘Thanet’ is a concept linking three seaside towns that ...”

“... War was. ‘Civilised warfare’ – arguably an oxymoron – is not what contemporaries saw. Ruskin thought that the war was fought by the Union for imperial domination of the South: ‘the most insolent and tyrannical, and the worst conducted, in all history’. Union senators did call for a ‘war of extermination’ against the South and Lincoln swore ...”

“... room ages ago but never cleared it out. Now, living alone, she can’t get up the stairs. True: Ruskin says one should not indulge in the pathetic fallacy, but peeking into this dust-laden camera abbandonata during hurried visits to the maternal hearth, I can’t help feeling that the crumpled tubes of acrylic paint, pots of dried-up gesso, broken picture ...”