“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... deliquescence into self-acknowledged shame and failure, and finally into years of silence; Wyndham Lewis, a man of extraordinary abilities, hardly exists now as a writer. Admiring sympathy may make the reader and critic assume, like Kenner, that ‘the culture’ betrayed their talents. Perhaps the most fully achieved and most surviving master of the ...”

“... The small rain down can rain? Christ that my love were in my arms And I in my bed again. C.S. Lewis used to say that it was his wife he was thinking of, not his mistress or girlfriend, otherwise he would most likely have written ‘in her bed again’. However that may be, the point is that de la Mare and Stevie Smith and Anon are all appealing to us over ...”

“... made the poet tell a New York audience including Franklin Roosevelt, Henry Morgenthau and Sinclair Lewis that ‘a great portion of the world suffers from your civilisation.’ Travelling to Paris, Wilson may have believed that liberalism ‘must be more liberal than ever before, it must even be radical, if civilisation is to escape the typhoon’. But secular ...”

“... King and the other ministers and divinity students at the movement’s core. They sound less like Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, and more like the early New England Puritans – those children of Israel in the New World – only they plead the case for inclusion rather than exclusion. ‘All Christians are of one body in Christ,’ John ...”

“... regimen, I should very soon be in a deplorable state of what is called nervous disease.’ Thomas Carlyle, whose own nerves had their deplorable moments, knew a fraught hidden drama when he saw one: ‘How has this man contrived, with such a nervous system, to keep alive for near sixty years?’ Given this insight, it was mischievous of Carlyle to go ...”

“... answer them. Herbert has influenced poets from Henry Vaughan and Richard Crashaw to Dylan Thomas and Geoffrey Hill. And not only poets; reading Herbert has made converts, even in modern times. While reciting ‘Love (III)’, the famous last poem in The Temple, Simone Weil felt that ‘Christ himself descended and took possession of me.’ A recent ...”