“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of 39’, but he is not much in evidence as a poet in these nine hundred pages. Writing to Wyndham Lewis in January 1926, he acknowledged that his recently issued Poems 1909-25 would not do much to alter critics’ views of his work: ‘But I wanted to collect all my stuff and get rid of it in one volume so as to get it out of my own way and make a fresh ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... course began skipping about the horizon.’ As ever, Alice, like the girl who shared her name in Lewis Carroll’s novels, relished the possibilities of resistant literalism for its power to take the strange philosophies and practices of others to the brink, from which extremity life began to look impossible, absurd, liveable and funny.Scene ...”

“... were the ever receding vistas of The Anathemata (1952), his epic about the matter of Britain. As Thomas Dilworth documented in his earlier David Jones in the Great War (2012), Jones saw more active service than any other British writer, all of it as a private, and outlived nearly all his contemporaries, with the exception of Robert Graves, born in the same ...”

“... Bryan Blundell was a supporter of a school for poor children which is still open today, while Thomas Leyland, as mayor, ‘was a terror to evil doers’. Leyland also became a partner in a bank jointly run by the Liverpool abolitionist William Roscoe, whom Melville singled out as ‘good and great’. Lawyer, art collector, botanist and public ...”

“... Caesar. His death. I always did whenever I read biographies. Because of course they all die. Thomas Alva Edison. Henry Ford. Benjamin Franklin. Marie Curie. Florence Nightingale. Winston Churchill. Louis Armstrong. Theodore Roosevelt.’‘You read Theodore Roosevelt’s biography when you were a kid?’‘I did, yes. There was a series. About twenty of ...”

“... to a prominent Lobby figure, had ‘displayed insensitivity and even hostility to our concerns’. Thomas Dine, the head of AIPAC at the time, explained what happened: ‘All the Jews in America, from coast to coast, gathered to oust Percy. And the American politicians – those who hold public positions now, and those who aspire – got the ...”

“... much as she ever moved, during her years in Brazil, among an elite set. Her letters to Lowell in Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton’s well-annotated volume throw interesting light on those years in Brazil. It is clear from the letters in One Art, the wonderful selection of her correspondence edited by Robert Giroux, that she found great happiness ...”

“... doctrinal teaching concerned the untrustworthiness of such poetic usages. Auden himself, a great Lewis Carroll fan, would possibly have said that Mendelson gets away with it by paying the images extra; and the prose does have at moments a slightly expensive quality.Carpenter tends to run into the opposite problem: not so much of overvaluing symbols as of ...”

“... in life’ than Wright had and thought he was ‘much less a social determinist’. Bigger Thomas, the violent central character in Native Son, ‘had none of the finer qualities of Richard Wright, none of the imagination, none of the sense of poetry, none of the gaiety’.Howe, Ellison complained, had never considered that ‘American Negro life’ is ...”