“... Williams liked these a great deal, and wrote to say so. He also tried to persuade his publisher, James Laughlin at New Directions, to take her on, though to no avail. In reply he received from Nardi a long series of bitter missives that castigate him for smugness and selfishness, and reveal her own despair: ‘Your whole relationship with me,’ she tells ...”

“... or the recollected terrors that it seeks to make good. Writing to his brother Stanislaus in 1905, James Joyce conceded: ‘I think Wordsworth of all English men of letters best deserves your word “genius”.’ Joyce was unlikely to be much taken by nature mysticism: what he may have found to admire in Wordsworth was his awareness of the momentousness that ...”

“... the period’s wealthiest author. In comparison, the circumstances of the very set-up indeed James Merrill (like Roussel an addicted poetic formalist), driving his own Volkswagen and using a homemade Ouija board all those years, seem positively peasant-like and self-reliant. Alison Lurie recently described Merrill in Connecticut, chatting in his kitchen ...”

“... and then ‘the sea full of floating brown pennies of oil’, an image and a phrase Elizabeth Bishop might not have disdained, with its quiet metaphorical swell. The rhythms and play of sounds, the subtle presence of things remembered in things seen, convey a genius for observation that one doesn’t think of as Forsterian. The ...”

“... the poet asks in an appeal from Meung-sur-Loire, near Orléans, where he was detained at the Bishop’s pleasure, probably in 1461. ‘Epistre a ses amis’ reads now, in the light of so much scholarship, translation, loose-clad homage and general ventriloquism on the part of a wide and posthumous circle of acquaintance from Swinburne to Lowell and ...”

“... own father was called Ignatius Dark. Sometimes you see him silently shaking with laughter – the Bishop of Gloucester begins an article on Christian doctrine: ‘The Apostle’s Creed need not detain us long.’ Among his friends Benson and G.M. Young top the list; Churchill displays such extraordinary power that in this feline company he is a little out of ...”

“... is essential for my free development of work and of life’. His daughter, the wife of a historian bishop with whom Trevelyan got on rather well, not surprisingly softens the outlines, notes his regular attendance at Chapel when Master of Trinity (1940-51), and records his saying: ‘If there had been more sensible clergymen in Cambridge in my time I could ...”

“... until, by a distant prompting’: such nerveless, Parnassian gestures fill space better given to Bishop and Lowell, Berryman and Rich. Those poets appear in the Faber Book only on the editor’s terms, which are roughly summed up by the title of Strand’s interviews with American figural painters, The Art of the Real. From the ‘light-filled grave’ of ...”

“... a less patrolled thoroughfare then than today’s bitter cemetery. It is assumed the Bishop of Hippo was white, but it seems a bit unlikely, given his birthplace. The Christ child whom he saw labouring to drain the sea appeared to him on the beach at Civitavecchia near Rome, the port where Stendhal was the French consul 14 centuries later. The ...”

“... romance outside their own class, among soldiers and working men, often paying for it. The writer James Pope-Hennessy, living in Ladbroke Grove with a former paratrooper called Lenny, loved inviting cabbies back to the flat and asking them what they did in bed: ‘how I adore getting a total stranger to speak freely about sex.’ When he gets out around the ...”

“... and still is, even in a world where couples get to know each other first. Hilda Thomas and Thomas James Meredith-Morris, back then in decorous 19 –, wouldn’t have been very well acquainted. In that, of course, they were simply figures of their generation. What made their marriage more than a run-of-the-mill case of domestic estrangement was her refusal to ...”

“... passages to the king: ‘In such places as the Author touches anything concerning the Bishop of Rome, I have noted it with a hand or words in the margin to the intent it should be in a readiness to you at all times in the reading.’ There is something of the wistful armchair traveller about Lord Morley, an Italophile who had never made it to ...”

“... Graham Tomlin, met Marshall at university, where they formed a folk duo. Tomlin was appointed bishop of Kensington in 2015 and resigned seven years later to found the Centre for Cultural Witness, which seeks to ‘inspire a renewal in the public understanding of Christian faith’ – again with funding from Marshall. Sequoia has donated at least £10 ...”

“... Explorations (1962). Yeats coined it to praise the philosophy of George Berkeley, the 18th-century bishop of Cloyne (and so a cleric, as well as ‘clerkly’), which Yeats thought had seen off a threat to civilisation no less deadly than that posed to Greece by Xerxes and his men: the enemy for Berkeley, as for Yeats, was not military but intellectual, the ...”

“... power, and still affect me as much as they ever did. I am thinking for example of the poet James Thomson’s lines on the unimaginably vast rivers of South America, not rivers so much as seas, which, bearing ‘the liquid weight of half the globe’, crash muddily into the green Atlantic. I am thinking of favourite walks, or rather favourite places to ...”