“... side’ seems to be partially based on Larsen. Van Vechten has a cameo in both of her novels as Hugh Wentworth, novelist and partygoer. He encouraged Larsen to write, particularly about her experiences as a Black woman. In October 1925, when she quit her job entirely, it was partly in response to his attention. He advised her to capitalise on what Hughes ...”

“... properly if the Allies trusted one another, and if they acted competently. When in 1941 two Danes, Thomas Sneum and Kjeld Pedersen, filmed a new kind of German radar station, then flew a homemade plane across the North Sea with their evidence, MI5 were first suspicious then ruined all but two frames of their film.Clandestine newspapers displayed a similar ...”

“... such works as James Audubon’s Birds of America, George Henry Lewes’s Sea-Side Studies, Hugh Miller’s The Old Red Sandstone and innumerable commercial contemplations of flowers, shells and natural novelties. Alternately artistic and sentimental in impulse, the tradition of nature-appreciation inspired works that were genuinely meditative as well ...”

“... New Age, and to meet Scottish intellectuals including the composer Francis George Scott (to whom Hugh MacDiarmid would dedicate A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle) and a French lecturer at Glasgow University called Denis Saurat (who is often credited with giving the 1920s Scottish literary renaissance its name). Most important, ‘in the early winter of 1918 I ...”

“... Making for the museum gate with long windy strides he lifted his eyes. Handsome building. Sir Thomas Deane designed. Not following me? Didn’t see me perhaps. Light in his eyes. The flutter of his breath came forth in short sighs. Quick. Statues: quiet there. Safe in a minute. No, didn’t see me. After two. Just at the gate. My heart! His eyes ...”

“... republicanism in recent years might be thought to have stimulated interest in Milton, but here Thomas Corns, editor of A Companion to Milton, sounds a warning note. This collection of essays, he writes, appears at a time when Milton’s standing with a wide readership appears ‘altogether more insecure’. In the US students prefer to study contemporary ...”

“... ecclesiastical tradition. The high point was reached more than three hundred years ago when Sir Thomas Browne published his Religio Medici, and Johnson’s indebtedness to this tradition is seen best in his borrowing of two habits common to such books: the sarcastic ridiculing of all secular opposition and a pious refusal to believe that atheism really ...”

“... on British Sea Songs, including ‘The Sailor’s Hornpipe’; ‘Rule, Britannia!’ composed by Thomas Arne, with orchestration by Malcolm Sargent; and finally ‘Jerusalem’, set to music by Parry, and later reorchestrated by Elgar. All of these involve active participation by the audience which, as the second half advances, becomes ever more ...”

“... an ex-Cluniac monastery that was among the properties (they included Kirkstall Abbey) granted to Thomas Cranmer on the death of Henry VIII. It wasn’t actually included in the royal will but was part of the general share-out that occurred then to fulfil the wishes supposedly expressed by Henry VIII on his deathbed. Not far away is Harewood House (where I do ...”

“... Merrill’s called The Bait. During a soliloquy ‘heads swivelled as “Arthur Miller and Dylan Thomas … stumbled out,”’ ‘passing judgment’, as Hammer puts it, ‘with their feet’. ‘I learned what Mr Miller, with uncanny insight, had whispered in Dylan’s ear shortly after the curtain rose,’ Merrill wrote years later in his memoir A ...”

“... to grant Pound heroic status from the outset is unwise. Moody nowhere says that Pound read Thomas Carlyle, but Carlyle’s notion of a church of literature taking the place of the Christian Church, and his emphasis on the importance of ‘The Hero as Poet’ (with Dante as the foundational example) and ‘The Hero as Man of Letters’ (culminating in ...”

“... also means the popular and the recondite, are characteristic of the poetry of any age. But, as Hugh Kenner points out in a typically brilliant if somewhat perverse essay called simply ‘Responsibilities’, Davie’s concern for poetic language is really a concern for culture as the modern equivalent of theology. ‘The Englishman who was pulled in the ...”

“... by Irish Dynamiters.’Eighteen months earlier, a young Irishman recently returned from America, Thomas J. Clarke, one of O’Donovan Rossa’s Sancho Panzas, had been arrested in London. Using evidence of an elaborate bomb factory in Birmingham, the Crown charged him and other followers of O’Donovan Rossa with treason. (The plan, it seems, had been to ...”

“... concerns have started to make their presence more strongly felt in the United States, and in Hugh Grady’s forthcoming The Modernist Shakespeare: Critical Texts in a Material World (Oxford) the ideological underpinnings and the literary and political roots of academic literary criticism on both sides of the Atlantic will be at the centre of the ...”

“... to belong to a British literature, and that many of his favourite poets wrote in English. And, as Thomas Crawford has shown, much of the folk repertoire he studied was common to both the northern and southern halves of the island. It is also true that Scots and English are branches of the same language, and that Burns was not, in the customary meaning of the ...”