“... looking up at his master, the lace, silver and silk: all these say more than the face. To give Charles I, a little man with a very ordinary face, regal presence, and to make his plain queen a beauty, was a gift the king knew the value of. In the exhibition the portrait of Charles by Daniel Mytens shows why Van Dyck ...”

“... works of a pre-socialist exponent of liberty, John Warr, who in the months around the execution of Charles I in January 1649 urged sweeping legal and political reforms. In Warr’s eyes, ‘liberty was the antithesis of power,’ not of property as Winstanley the Digger might have maintained: ‘it represented both the restraint of the mighty by the law and a ...”

“... delivered, as if in response to an order, to Jenkinson at a dinner party given by a mutual friend, Charles Ellis. The covering note implied that the posters were already up in the streets. It was an appeal for Tight lads who would wish for a fair opportunity Of defying the Frenchmen with perfect impunity ... ’Tis the bold Colonel Jenkinson calls you to arm ...”

“... dark past, though legally things can get sticky if they don’t. When the journalist Matt Blake bought a house in Walthamstow after a divorce, the listing said nothing about the previous inhabitants. But the people he bought the house from, and some of his new neighbours, were reticent when he asked them about its history. Soon after moving in, he ...”

“... the view of posterity. The most extraordinary of these acts of intellectual banditry remains Sir Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, of 1830-1833, where Lyell argues that geology starts with himself. So, an Enlightenment which believed in materialism and progress, but which was a scientific non-event. Strange. The great merit of The Ferment of Knowledge ...”

“... in his bonsai garden. They might, it’s true, find it a bit too well-tended. From Thom Gunn and Charles Tomlinson to (in their new collections) William Scammell and John Ash, English poets have thought of America as a place to hang loose, an adventure playground of the spirit. Eldorado moves Scammell beyond the erudite, edgy satirical mode which has been ...”

“... Pauline epigraph: ‘I had not known sin, but by the law.’ He always had gurus – Gerald Heard, Charles Williams, Georg Groddeck, Homer Lane. Some quietly faded away, but with a few he enjoyed an enduring sympathy: Forster and Virginia Woolf, for instance, and Eliot, with the respect due to the publisher of his first book of poems, but staying well short of ...”

“... Land, the Cantos, Williams’s Paterson and Bunting’s Briggflatts were Louis Zukofsky’s A, Charles Olson’s Maximus, Allen Ginsbert’s Howl, the substitution of ‘breath’ for metre and gossip for metaphor. Adrian Henri and Roger McGough, with their sedulous imitation of the faux-naif Modernism of e.e.cummings, were just as much part of the ...”

“... on our range of sexual satisfactions. At first glance, the enterprise looks promising. Didn’t Blake and Shelley believe in free love? Didn’t Coleridge and Southey plan to establish a liberationist commune in America? Didn’t Byron and Hazlitt write with startling candour about sex? On closer inspection, things are more tricky. Whatever their views on ...”

“... Charles Palliser’s The Quincunx has been one of the more intriguing literary successes of recent years, and one which raises some interesting questions about the always fraught and problematic relationship between contemporary novelists and the reading public they like to imagine themselves serving. Briefly, the situation is this ...”

“... Gray’s Leaving the 20th Century, Abiezer Coppe, Georges Bataille. Oddly, the name William Blake never passes the lips(tick) of this book. Marcus uses as well the reminiscences and recapitulations of various people who were swept up in the storms raised by these people: for example, Henri Lefebvre, Michele Bernstein, Richard Huelsenbeck, Malcolm ...”

“... book and enables us to identify two important early influences: Donald Davie and Charles Olson. The rest of his work has appeared from small presses and in little magazines. It has been regular and prolific: more than two dozen books or pamphlets to date, of which two – Pearls that Were and Triodes – appeared last year after the ...”

“... to the success of Northern Irish poetry during the last twenty-five or thirty years. Ever since Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion gave the primacy of this work semi-official status in The Penguin Anthology of Contemporary British Poetry, the question has been what gives Northern Irish poets their edge. Many reasons have been advanced for the ...”

“... is likely to tell the whole story. Hence Gillray’s serial return to certain characters – Charles Fox, Napoleon, George III, the Prince of Wales, Burke, Sheridan and Pitt. The motive, the posture, the degree of deplorable wheedling would shift even as the character stayed the same.An earlier biographer, Draper Hill, judged that Gillray had ‘lifted ...”

“... Benn had tackled two generations of remarkable Drysdales and their partners: George, his brother Charles Robert, the latter’s mistress and intellectual colleague Alice Vickery, their son Charles Vickery Drysdale, and his wife Bessie. And when I saw the proofs I realised that she had indeed researched her subject ...”