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“... wife of a young colleague at Princeton. The affair generated a sequence of 115 sonnets produced at white heat over the course of the year. There are quite a few gracefully rendered and successful 20th-century sonnets that cleave to the Italian, as in this case, or Elizabethan model, and many more that play with or deviate from that strict form in interesting ...”

“... 1000 ad, looking back to the glories of King Edgar’s day. After the Spithead Mutiny of 1797, Edmund Burke moaned: ‘Our only hope is a submission to the enemy … as to our navy, that has already perished with its discipline for ever.’ Only eight years later came Trafalgar, the most thumping victory ever at sea. The movement from neglect and despair ...”

“... symposium ‘on the Negro’. (Symposia on the Negro were popular in the 1960s, helping to keep white liberal panellists occupied and furrowed until the ferocious later phase of Black Power made them all squirm.) Kazin had been unable to attend the symposium itself but, never one to miss a party, popped into the reception being thrown by Commentary’s ...”

“... the scene even more touching. 6 February. I am reading a history of the Yorkshire Dales by Robert White, one of a series, Landscape through Time, published by English Heritage. During the enclosures of the 18th and 19th centuries, most of the land enclosed was added to existing farms, but in 1809 John Hulton used the land allotted to him from the enclosure of ...”

“... a letter excerpted in the notes, Thomas distances himself from ‘the Master’. What a shame that Edmund Morgan, having learned so much from Freud, forgot to mention him in his work on the Puritan family. As for E.R. Dodds, it’s unscrupulous of Gay to offer his Greeks and the Irrational as exemplary Freudian scholarship when its debts to Nietzsche and ...”

“... premiere of The Rake’s Progress – one finds that the boon-companions were Peter Bartok, Edmund Wilson, Fritz Reiner, Rudolph Bing, Alma Mahler-Werfel, Paco Lagerstrom, Auden, Kallman, Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein. Stravinsky was, however, saddled at this time as on several occasions with the chaotic if aristocratic poet Edward James (whose laugh ...”

“... often touched on the long-standing anxiety that trouble in the colonies would come home to roost. Edmund Burke, writing at the end of the 18th century during an earlier imperial crisis, warned that unless Parliament restrained the East India Company ‘the breakers of the law in India’ could become ‘the makers of law in England’. The agents of imperial ...”

“... young pheasant skitters across the road. Nothing unusual in that except that this pheasant is pure white. I’m not given to a belief in signs or portents but it’s nevertheless quite cheering to feel that she’s still around. The service in the village church in the afternoon is packed. I give an address but the whole occasion is wonderfully and ...”

“... come in? Early on he became interested in comparative anthropology thanks to Meyer Fortes and Edmund Leach at Cambridge. He acquired the idea of a historical anthropology from Jean-Pierre Vernant in Paris. Twenty years ago he took up ancient Chinese science. He has since become the world’s foremost contributor to studies comparing aspects of ancient ...”

“... absence. But in that case, Fanny wouldn’t join her household and would miss daily contact with Edmund, who notices her and then doesn’t, releasing an important dramatic energy into the book. So Austen has to have Lady Bertram be there and not there at the very same time; she has to give her characteristics which are essentially neutral. Since her husband ...”

“... the pharmacist had hung an empty wasps’ nest from a shelf: small, exquisite, clean matte white, and hard as stucco. I admired it so much he gave it to me. The wasps’ nest, rather than the map or the Atlantic Ocean, is now Bishop’s symbolic equivalent for art: an organic form (unlike her former inorganic monument in the poem of that ...”

“... Panter-Downes, London correspondent for the New Yorker, put it) would be impossible to say. When Edmund Wilson visited England in 1956 he was struck by how well-regulated life seemed: ‘In spite of the developments since the last war,’ he wrote, ‘the social system is still largely taken for granted, and it is soothing for an American to arrive in a ...”

“... the era of the Civil War. We therefore need to recalibrate our assessment of the violence between white protagonists so as to open our eyes to the far darker realities of ethnic division. And furthermore – though he doesn’t quite say as much – he seems to think that by putting the Civil War in its proper place on the scale of destruction we can also ...”

“... a reader might expect to meet in the sort of ghost story where sceptical explanations are absent? Edmund Wilson advanced a version of the projective view, while F.R. Leavis – in the course of a ‘disagreement’ with Marius Bewley on the subject which is contained in Bewley’s The Complex Fate – came out on the other side. Leavis thinks of the tale as a ...”

“... stuff on the Georgians, to whom he attached himself through the early influence of Eddie Marsh and Edmund Gosse (correspondingly they did not much care for the raw tone of his war poetry). But it was Sassoon’s own inclination to look back to lost worlds and the happy days of his youth that kept him so stubbornly hostile to T.S. Eliot and to Modernism in ...”