“... but deny it is shared by Paradise Lost and Milton’s other poems – the position taken by C.S. Lewis, among others. If you want, you can loop back and argue that this theological disparity is a reason to deny that Milton wrote De Doctrina Christiana.Authorship denial began with Bishop Burgess of Salisbury in 1829, and had a revival in the late 20th ...”

“... are inspiring neighbours to slit each others’ throats.12 March. Reading P. Ackroyd’s Thomas More, which I finish today, leaves me in two minds, the tolerance and scepticism of the author of Utopia and the dogmatism and heresy-hunting of the lawyer never adding up and not short of hypocrisy. It’s hard not to feel there is something specifically ...”

“... and the dole, and the collapse of Lord Leverhulme’s attempt to set up manufacturing industry on Lewis. The TLS reviewer had no difficulty in categorising I Crossed the Minch with other books of the time (by Edwin Muir and Neil Gunn) that treat Scotland and its islands in hard, socio-economic terms. MacNeice knew that the Hebrides – unlike Synge’s Aran ...”

“... his work on the philosophy of science anticipates, by more than thirty years, the discussion by Thomas Kuhn of ‘incommensurability’. His more general philosophical work, his discussions of belief, knowledge and causality, is today the subject of a renewed and growing interest among philosophers. A further claim to fame is that he was, at the age of ...”

“... poetry.) ‘Autobiography involves the heart and the head, the body remembers itself as well,’ Lewis Warsh wrote, reviewing A Serial Biography in 1977 (eight years after publication). Autobiography, how the writer stands in relation to his work, is the whole matter. Poets have to find a way to factor immediate perceptions, half-thoughts, the trash and ...”

“... origins of American fiction, as in the work of Richard Poirier (A World Elsewhere) or R.W.B. Lewis (The American Adam). One can see how smoothly Faulkner’s concentration on one obscure corner of Mississippi fits into this regionalist-patriotic pattern. His latest biographer says on his first page: ‘He is our great provincial.’ The sentence rumbles ...”

“... with the authority of experience: the hand that wrote them was permanently blue with indigo. At Thomas Wardle’s factory in Leek, Staffordshire and then at his own workshop at Merton Abbey, Morris fussed over the dye vat, drawing on antiquarian books to revive older and better modes of manufacture. Yet the freedom was his alone. He bullied Wardle’s ...”

“... Park, and is, coincidentally, where Willa Cather also came to summer with her partner, Edith Lewis. Yourcenar and Frick’s white clapboard house with black shutters was surrounded by trees and filled with old things, such as Delft tiles and Indonesian tapestry, as well as hundreds of books arranged by century. From 1951 it was Yourcenar’s permanent ...”

“... The Jazz Singer as it ran on Broadway, toured the country, and was televised in 1959 with Jerry Lewis in the tide role: the repentant son replaces his dying father as cantor, who had in turn replaced his father, who had in turn ... It was a ritual, sentimentalised affirmation of eternal Jewishness even in the thick of the New World. The ...”

“... poem in three books, with a hero called Tibbald who was the lawyer, playwright and textual scholar Lewis Theobald. Theobald earned himself his role as King of the Dunces by finding fault with Pope’s 1725 edition of Shakespeare in his Shakespeare Restored: or, A Specimen of the Many Errors, as well Committed, as Unamended, by Mr Pope in his late Edition of ...”

“... founding treaty was delayed until April 1949 so that Harry Truman could fight off a challenge from Thomas E. Dewey in the 1948 US presidential election. Britain requested that the treaty be signed in Barbados; Portugal suggested the Azores as a symbolic mid-Atlantic location; but the US insisted on Washington and so it was. Say what you will of the Delian ...”

“... self-portrait’ is there, perhaps, in the form of Robertson Davies, Alasdair Gray, Russell Hoban, Thomas Pynchon.If critics too often reach for the same adjectives when describing Burgess’s work – comic, satirical, Swiftian, Rabelaisian – it’s because Burgess himself started rolling the ball in that direction. But to classify him as primarily a ...”

“... my battered 1970s paperback carries endorsements from Richard Hughes, Naomi Mitchison and C.S. Lewis, and Auden was an early fan. (Auden was a patron saint of lost causes. He was also the only major writer to stand up for Laura Riding.) But mostly, the sort of people who get their opinions published have lashed it with contempt. ‘Hypertrophic . . . A ...”

“... a short story for a magazine. It must be smart and ‘gripping’, with stock sentiments (Wyndham Lewis jeered at them heartily, not realising that they were intentional). This is enough reason for it to leave out the detail of the spectacles. Ellmann also reports that he disliked having to wear them, leaving them off at parties apparently, but surely he ...”

“... black ink from his student days at Jesus. There are numerous pencil annotations and links to Thomas Hardy. There are tutting knuckle-raps: ‘No.’ ‘Crass.’ With the odd B+ sop: ‘Elements of a clear insight here.’ As Moore points out, Prynne, director of studies at Caius, kept two ledgers recording the volumes circulated from his own ...”