“... light by Wordsworth, as an example of all that was merely poeticised. In a letter to his friend Richard West, Gray happily declared the very attitudes to poetic diction that Wordsworth was later to detect and condemn. ‘The language of the age is never the language of poetry,’ he observed. By which he meant that it never should be. ‘Our poetry ...”

“... More drew on Sallust and Tacitus to compose his study of tyranny in The History of King Richard III. Shakespeare, inspired by More’s history, departed from it in loyally contrasting Richard with his virtuous Tudor successors. More’s praise of the first two Tudors could hardly have been more perfunctory. To ...”

“... Students went to whatever university he was at. That he became a controversial and widely-known scholar only in the last years of his life was in harmony with his bearing. His courtesy was absolute, but so was his refusal to accommodate either the text or his thoughts. The teaching was superb because his intellect was quick and penetrated always beyond the ...”

“... about its deliberate obscurity. It is the equivalent of shutting a door in its reader’s face. As Richard Sewall, her biographer, noted, ‘She enjoyed riddles, apparently enjoyed being one.’ But was she a riddle that wanted to be solved? Did she want readerly guests? Helen Vendler’s Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries and Lyndall Gordon’s Lives ...”

“... most splendid case of this in Shakespeare’s early drama is of course the king known as Richard Crookback. The chronology of the early writing being as vexed as it is, it’s hard to say whether Richard III precedes The Two Gentlemen of Verona. But the character has all the compelling, attention-focusing quality I ...”

“... than Ginsberg ever proved to be. There were, for example, the soon-to-be-distinguished poet and scholar John Hollander, the critic Steven Marcus, and Jason Epstein, destined to become a force in New York publishing. None of these was to figure in his career with the importance of Lionel Trilling. The two first met when, in his senior year, Podhoretz ...”

“... 1374 of them – for whom we have some record of book-collecting activity, from the legal scholar John Selden’s eight thousand volumes, now part of the Bodleian collection, to ‘a trunk full of books’, in the words of Mary Marston, widow of the poet John Marston, ‘with lock and key and a book of martyrs [John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments] in 3 ...”

“... do so comes from dissatisfaction with two dominant readerly positions: ‘the furrowed brow of the scholar deciphering an intractable subtext and the blissful mien of the subway rider devouring a bestseller’. The Felskian postcritic slices through the supposed divide between detached, academic reading and lay reading with pleasure. These caricatures aren’t ...”

“... Edward Diestelkamp in giving equal credit for the building’s structure to the ironfounder Richard Turner as to its architect, Decimus Burton. The lives of the building’s inhabitants – plant and human – are glimpsed in short but informative chapters which describe the inception of the idea for such a building, its design, manufacture and ...”

“... not to have read most modern discussions’ of Aeschylus’s plays, he will eagerly seek out Richard Reizenstein’s analysis of Greek novels in his brilliant Hellenistische Wundererzählung. Such readers may once, I suppose, have manned the farthest outposts of the Empire, but nowadays they are surely rare birds. Readership or no readership, Mr Levi’s ...”

“... poet which became an enduring model of the Late Victorian official Life and Letters, according to Richard Altick’s history of literary biography: ‘as a work of biographical art, it is as monstrous and marmoreal as a tomb in Westminster Abbey.’ And even blander than the repainted Laurence portrait. Although, inevitably, there is a good bit of factual ...”

“... the college libraries as well as several other great collections and became the world’s leading scholar on Apocryphal literature. He then returned to Eton for the last 18 years of his life as provost. He had thus spent his entire adult existence in ‘Henry’s holy shade’, untroubled by marriage, poverty or anything much else. Even among his fellow dons ...”

“... But what in fact took place was not a dramatic imposition of inquisitorial restraints on a scholar. Dr Küng occupied a chair of Catholic theology in which he could only discharge his duties by teaching not just about Catholic theology – which could be done perfectly adequately by a Protestant, a Jew or an atheist – but as a Catholic ...”

“... myself seriously as a student. In fact, it seemed to make it somewhat easier for me to write.’ Richard Klein, now the celebrated author of Cigarettes Are Sublime, was one of the guys. Approached by Duke for a quote, he wrote: ‘For decades I have felt guilt and shame for having performed toward her in a way that was unprofessional, exploitative, and lousy ...”

“... told her. ‘You have the courage of your connections!’) Marriage – to Michael Aris, a scholar of Tibet and a friend of the Gore-Booths – deferred but did not dispel this sense of unfulfilled destiny, which was evident in letters written during their courtship. I only ask one thing, that should my people need me, you would help me to do my duty ...”