“... a 24-page pamphlet that – according to one of his drawings – Crumb and his first wife, Dana Morgan, sold for a quarter out of a baby buggy on the streets of Haight-Ashbury. The cover was designed to shock, depicting a self-electrocuting naked man, plugged into a light socket and launched into the air in a foetal position. Addressing itself to ‘flipped ...”

“... Charles​ Booth’s survey of London poverty was an epic Victorian undertaking. Beginning in the late 1880s with East London, Booth and his army of investigators launched a systematic study which went on to cover nearly all of the metropolis, then the largest in the world with around four million inhabitants. The accounts of their walks around London filled 450 notebooks ...”

“... Illuminations catalogue was reproduced in these pages, the exhibition had just opened in the Morgan Library in New York. Most of the items were (or were very like) drawings made for print. The framed originals would not, I thought, add much to the intense pleasure to be had from the reproductions. Now that the exhibition has come to London – it can be ...”

“... each new position gained. ‘What do I write to say? I don’t know,’ he complained to Edwin Morgan in an undated letter (probably from the early 1950s). ‘The kind of poem I want to write is very far away from even TNF’ – ‘The Nightfishing’ – ‘I know more about poetry than I’ve ever done before. Maybe that is what is wrong but I don’t ...”

“... In her ingenious ‘autobiography’ of Delariviere Manley, A Woman of No Character (1987), Fidelis Morgan contrived an effect of literary trompe l’oeil. Artfully interweaving extracts from Manley’s ‘secret histories’, The Adventures of Rivella (1714) and The New Atalantis (1709), with passages of factual commentary, she offered a counterfeit self-portrait of a woman whose true identity might best be represented as a series of fictional impostures ...”

“... Grub Street Cleopatra on her barge. As a junior member of the Cabinet with intellectual leanings, Charles Masterman had been charged with doing something that would produce effective propaganda for the Allied cause, especially in the neutral United States. He responded by convening in Whitehall a gathering of ‘eminent authors’, attended by William ...”

“... in about 1688 that shows some new building, but nothing on anything like the scale of what, had Charles I survived or Charles II been in funds, would have lorded it over a long Thames frontage. Fires in 1691 and 1698 finally put an end to Whitehall Palace. Court offices were relocated in the undamaged tennis ...”

“... list is far from remote. Indeed it is regrettably relevant. It is Political Violence in Ireland by Charles Townshend. I have been singing Townshend’s praises for years past. I think he is the outstanding authority on a subject of vital importance. His new book presents the essential theme in Irish history ever since the European Revolutions of 1848. The ...”

“... irony which makes a joke of the self-pity at the same time – as when he characterises himself to Charles Monteith, his worldly editor at Faber and Faber, as a ‘simple ploughboy from the north’, which he certainly wasn’t. In his bouncy Memoirs of the Forties (1965), Julian Maclaren-Ross offers a memorable portrait of Graham brooding over his pint, a man ...”

“... to see home as a ‘provincial’ bore, there have been poets around for some time, such as Edwin Morgan and Roy Fisher, who give the lie to that. Home is no longer ‘so sad’. At home few people speak Proper English all the time. Home-based poetry may be in dialect, which is present in nearly all the writers considered here: but it may also fuel itself ...”

“... move (‘firmness and urbanity’). From Ragtime we learn that the ship’s principal owner, J.P. Morgan, was portrayed by cartoonists with cigar and top-hat (‘incarnation of power’). The poem introduces an ironic variation. A garrulous Russian exile of 1912 uttering revolutionary cant aboard the Titanic in an exquisite haze of Partagas, and quarrelsome ...”

“... stand. Their nation, of whose actuality they seem to possess only the frailest knowledge: Prince Charles, already well into middle age, was surprised to learn from a bibliomane that Charing Cross Road had once been the centre of the London book trade. He is constantly bemused by farmers using pesticides.What they do feel they know is that their subjects ...”

“... he pursued a cat-and-mouse game of rapprochement with conspiratorial Catholic exiles like Thomas Morgan, Charles Paget and Charles Arundel. In the view of Sir Francis Walsingham, Stafford’s relations with the enemy went far beyond the requirements of secret diplomacy, and ...”

“... focused on thirty individual cases, including those involving three cabinet ministers, Blunkett, Charles Clarke and John Prescott. Edis told the court that while their papers were busy hacking to find evidence of other people’s affairs – in January 2003 the Sun ran a story calling Andy Gilchrist, then leading the Fire Brigade Union in a series of strikes ...”

“... also made use of the ideas of European and North American anthropologists and historians such as Charles Letourneau, Lewis Henry Morgan and Henry Maine, who suggested that common ownership of land had been the basis of primitive society in most countries before its replacement by capitalist relations of production. In ...”