“... Victorian literary and artistic worlds: his maternal grandfather was Ford Madox Brown, his uncle William Michael Rossetti. The only possible career for the children of these classes was that of a genius. Ford’s Rossetti cousins had written Greek dramas at the ages of five, nine and fourteen respectively. It became his duty always to aspire to ...”

“... like the bridegroom victimised by the succuba in “Ode”.’ We are a long way from the dogged hunt for allusions to grail myths and fertility rituals of earlier generations of Eliot scholars. Miller attempts no such theoretical arabesques. He is more like a McCarthy-inspired gumshoe than a queer theory exegete. He just wants to persuade his readers that ...”

“... where, after some rummaging (there are not even any running heads with page numbers to make the hunt easier), we find the note: ‘William Wordsworth (1770-1850), poet laureate from 1843’. It is almost impossible to reconstruct the conception of readers and their needs that can have led to the insertion of these ...”

“... he wrote ‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale’ only a few years later. The priest says of a noisy fox hunt: ‘Jack Straw and his men/Never shouted half so shrill/When they would any Fleming kill.’ The Flemings were mostly weavers or other skilled artisans, and were sharp economic competitors, hence their unpopularity. The same is true of the victims of the ...”

“... spaces where they had previously been completely absent, preservationists like John Ruskin and William Wordsworth (‘Is then no nook of English ground secure/From rash assault?’). The agents of Network Rail, who are building the Ordsall Chord, can and do portray themselves playing the Stephenson role. They claim originality: the bridge, an arch with a ...”

“... than lessened by the connoisseur’s deadpan delivery. To envisage himself as an artist in the hunt for ‘any exceptionally nice little nudity … who is willing to be victimised for my benefit’ is to be laughingly self-aware about the strangeness of his own obsessions without quite laughing them off. Nabokov gets close to the mesmerising, disturbing ...”

“... men – women weren’t admitted to Magdalen until 1979 – who came good under his supervision: William Hague, found guilty of ‘electoral malpractice’ during his time in the university’s Conservative Association; an advocate, at the Oxford Union, of the birch and stocks; Chris Huhne, later energy secretary in David Cameron’s cabinet; Jeremy ...”

“... a week before his trip to Seattle, he was wearing a Malcolm X cap and carrying a well-worn copy of William Gaddis’s novel The Recognitions. On 8 July, after a breakfast with the Democratic presidential candidate and former basketball star Bill Bradley, Joe went to Mount Rainier to do some birdwatching. He never returned. The most likely explanation is that ...”

“... it up, just go out there and kill Soviets.’ These orders came from a most peculiar American. William Casey, the CIA’s director from January 1981 to January 1987, was a Catholic Knight of Malta educated by Jesuits. Statues of the Virgin Mary filled his mansion, called ‘Maryknoll’, on Long Island. He attended mass daily and urged Christianity on ...”

“... him it was ‘the most ecstatic reaction I have seen to any book I have known anything about’. William Empson welcomed ‘a grand biography’; Cyril Connolly, though naturally disappointed not to find himself mentioned, nevertheless recognised something ‘truly masterly’; and Frank Kermode wrote that Ellmann’s account would ‘fix Joyce’s image for ...”

“... We buy a luminous blue and white Victorian tile at Gabor Cossa which one of the partners thinks is William de Morgan but isn’t and then cross the road to the Fitzwilliam. I take in a chance selection of pictures, dictated by which happen to be in range of available banquettes, and in particular the Van Dyck portrait of Archbishop Laud. It’s hung beside one ...”

“... the missionary Journeys; the Miracles; the Revelations; the Agony’. Reviewing a biography of Sir William Stephenson, a figure in British wartime intelligence, he declined even to list its inaccuracies: ‘To make such a charge against this biographer would be unfair. It would be like urging a jellyfish to grit its teeth and dig in its heels.’ In his 1951 ...”

“... of a national culture. Part of the effect of the French Revolution in Britain was, as Leigh Hunt remarked, ‘to endear the nation to its own habits’. Amongst these was a mistrust of rational abstraction and a preference for intuitive, organic development. Led by Coleridge’s organicist political theories transmuted to a theory of ...”

“... and Classification Department. It was hardly a heroic war.’ But he did write heroically. William Pritchard, in his biography of Jarrell, says that ‘in letter after letter, Jarrell turned the routine, the boredom, the loneliness and the wastefulness of army life far from the zones of combat into the figures of something like art.’ In February ...”

“... by the Inquisition in the 14th century. It had now been perfected into an Ars extirpanda: the hunt for heretics in the arts and literature had begun in earnest. It was April, always a cruel month for poets. The year was 1971, exactly ten years after the Meetings at the Library, when Fidel Castro concluded his speech (and the meetings) with a dictum which ...”