“... its triumphs could be carried forward by a whole range of later historians, by Veronica Wedgwood, Christopher Hill and the rest. Carlyle hated democracy, both the word and the idea, which is no doubt one source of his appeal at Peterhouse. But Cromwell’s army was much more truly representative of the English people than was Parliament, and Carlyle it was ...”

“... uses of allusion by major British poets of the 18th and 19th centuries: Dryden, Pope, Wordsworth, Burns, Byron, Keats and Tennyson. The second, ‘In the Company of Allusion’, is a collection of occasional essays on allusion in minor or contemporary poets, or on general topics related to allusion: there are pieces on A.E. Housman, Yvor Winters, David ...”

“... not to have her ‘natural discrimination’ spoiled by a formal literary education. In a piece on Burns that’s otherwise memorable only for its unscandalised take on the poet’s sinful ways (‘Burns adored women. Whenever he had sex, which was often, he wrote a song about it’), she wrote: ‘His schooldays were short ...”

“... Scholar, was spending the summer tramping around France and Italy with a recently made friend, Christopher Middleton. They had only two books with them, a collection of Donne’s poems and Pound’s Cantos. ‘Neither of us, I think, had much notion as to what the long poem was about,’ Davenport remembered, ‘except that it had strangeness and beauty in ...”

“... play of that name. Galileo wasn’t thinking of superheroes, of course, but Jonathan and Christopher Nolan, the writers of The Dark Knight, the new Batman movie, are certainly thinking along Galileo’s lines. What is Gotham City to do without a hero, since organised crime is always, it seems, far too much for the official institutions of law and ...”

“... Riding Lights, 1955) yields little by way of helpful clues. And when in ‘Moor Burns’ (The Sinai Sort, 1957) MacCaig describes the effect of light on a landscape as ‘placing in air / Precisely this precisely there and that / In a place made due to it by planes of light’, what does this exercise in logical circuitousness really ...”

“... over the last three centuries have found direct or indirect sustenance in Macpherson’s poems: Burns’s visionary ‘duans’; Walter Scott’s ‘translations’ of ‘Highland Minstrelsy’ in Waverley; Fenimore Cooper’s translatorese standing in for Native American languages; Byron’s ‘Imitation of Macpherson’s Ossian’; Goethe’s Werther; and ...”

“... Es ist besser wie packin pants. As the Victorian Irish proved to the satisfaction of John Burns, however, not all victims of malnutrition and unemployment succumb to prostitution. The medical educationalist Abraham Flexner – evidently the anonymous ‘student’ whom Theodore Dreiser mentions in his introduction to Londres’s book – spent two ...”

“... the 12th century, of a precise and specialised concept of the miraculous, is complemented by R.M. Burns’s study of the debate over miracles in 17th and 18th-century Britain. Burns mounts a vigorous attack on what might be called rationalist orthodoxy. He begins by nailing up three theses. The first is that ‘the sceptics ...”

“... epithets of other labouring-class poets, Clare’s doesn’t describe his main employment. Robert Burns was the Ploughman Poet; Stephen Duck, the Thresher Poet. We have at least three Shoemaker/Cobbler Poets: John Askham, John Gregory and Robert Bloomfield, whom Clare regarded as ‘the first of Rural Bards’. It seems unjust that Clare should be denied a ...”

“... the back of the book records such key events as (May 1935) ‘HR beaten up visiting dockworkers; burns MSS’ and (October 1946) ‘Burns MSS; murders puppy’. He was born in 1906 in Tysmenitz: now in Ukraine, it was a Polish town until 1772 when it was absorbed by the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Roth’s father, Chaim, had ...”

“... His mind grew dim. And he fell far through that pit abysmal,  The gulf and grave of Maginn and Burns, And pawned his soul for the devil’s dismal            Stock of returns. Abysmal, yes, and dismal; the rhyme has something of the demented unignorability of Tennyson’s rhyme of ‘abysm’ with ‘Zolaism’. The first page of the ...”

“... apparently shot himself in the chest. There were, however, about the body no traces of the powder burns that would normally have been inevitable in such a case. This anomaly was never adequately investigated, so that, although Haffenden is too tactful to impose a judgment, one is obliged to consider, after reading his account, the possibility that the death ...”

“... name’ (the phrase is Scott’s) seemed to stamp him with vulgarity. Hogg was not – like Burns – a radical, but the ‘innocent rusticity’ he cultivated could look like levelling insolence to anxious Tories. Wordsworth snubbed him at Mount Rydal. De Quincey, Scott and Byron questioned his breeding. Even his colleagues at Blackwood’s Edinburgh ...”

“... Keats walked this coast he felt it followed him,’ I said. But our plans involved Robert Burns. Karl, since he first began publishing Seamus in the New Statesman in the 1960s, always felt there was a clear affinity between Burns and Heaney. They were both the sons of farmers and they both allowed nature to ...”