“... and iron pins, bits of ancient Celtic jewellery. One hot afternoon I uncovered a charred piece of wood with two verdigris teeth sticking through it. I ran to show it to my mother – ran through the heavy shifting sand, tripped, and as I clenched it, the little bit of dry wood melted to dust. Disappointed, I clutched the ...”

“... and politics might imply: The fields from Islington to Marybone To Primrose Hill and Saint Johns Wood: Were builded over with pillars of gold, And there Jerusalem’s pillars stood. Blake’s short poem ‘Jerusalem’, peculiarly celebrated as the most English of visions, thinks of Christ among the English, rather than picturing the English as pilgrims to ...”

“... a thoughtful study of Hopkins as a decadent poet in Essays in Criticism, quotes in another context Dennis Taylor’s judgment that Hopkins’s mode of poetry reveals the creative vitality latent in speech, where Hardy formalises its banality and obsolescence. Speech patterns are more important than Hopkins’s theories of inscape, instress and so on, which did ...”

“... Four pall-bearers – Charles Kray (North), Freddie Foreman (South), Johnny Nash (West), Teddy Dennis (East) – would symbolise the seigneurial homage paid by the four cardinal districts of London. The conceit was Blakean, the Sons of Albion ‘dividing the space of love with brazen compasses’. St Matthew’s is one of those typical East London parish ...”

“... or in many British films of the 1950s, for that matter – and no gay characters either (although Dennis Price and Robert Hamer, the star and director of Kind Hearts and Coronets, were both gay). The quintessential ‘Englishness’ so often lauded in these films wasn’t total: throughout his book, Stubbs is unusually attentive to the musical content of ...”

“... Holder whiskers, the period of ‘Exposure’, of ‘long-haired and thoughtful’, of the ‘wood-kerne’ and the ‘inner émigré’. But the cheekbones are there. And a listener for sure. ‘You’ve listened long enough. Now strike your note,’ he has the ghost of Joyce address him in the marvellous ‘Station Island’ sequence from 1984. Tweed ...”

“... edition of Winter derives in part from Hill’s critical writings). He also knew the critic John Dennis, John Dyer (the author of the loco-descriptive smash-hit Grongar Hill), Richard Savage, Nahum Tate (the Poet Laureate) and Edward Young (Night Thoughts). For a while, early in his career, Hill acted as secretary to Lord Peterborough, the future honorary ...”

“... apologetic exorcist from the Church of England. He visits a couple who live in a flat where Dennis Nilsen murdered some of his victims. They have managed to banish the memory of what happened there to create a happy home. ‘We can choose to live in fear, or we can choose to face our fears,’ they tell Blake. ‘The space is yours. Reclaim it with your ...”

“... and meets over the bright path he makes, where rain has darkened the earth’s dark. He moves in a wood of desire.Wilmer, in his introduction to the new Selected Poems, writes that Gunn always insisted that his use of syllabics ‘was a stage on the road to free verse, which he had earlier found difficult to write’. He notes that ‘Touch’, written in ...”

“... that a moment in 2013, when Prynne could be seen fleetingly on Celebrity Masterchef being served wood pigeon by Les Dennis, might be regarded as a serendipitous objective correlative for this phenomenon.) Appreciation, on the other hand, remains as tricky as ever. The easiest criticism of Prynne’s work has always been ...”

“... Five dramatised features won awards, including The Streets of Pompeii by Henry Reed, Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas, and MacNeice’s Prisoner’s Progress. Meanwhile MacNeice’s play The Dark Tower, written just after VJ Day and first broadcast in the Home Service on 21 January 1946, was published with some of his other scripts in 1947 – a signal ...”

“... early 18th-century wall-panelling from the wiring and plumbing of excessive modern convenience. Dennis Severs has gone further and reconstructed behind his door in Folgate Street the imaginary candle-lit world – ‘a collection of atmospheres’ – of an 18th-century family. A few streets to the east, Jocasta Innes has been busy reviving traditional ...”

“... selected volumes that Heaney went on to publish. ‘Where else could it be placed?’ Heaney asked Dennis O’Driscoll, his Boswell. The contrast between the two signature poems is striking. Heaney finds in the spectacle of his father digging a model for his own poetic enterprise: he is obliged to use his pen where ‘the old man’ used a spade, but in some ...”

“... Literary Diary which records the birthdays of various contemporary literary figures. Here is Dennis Potter on 17 May, Michael Frayn on 8 September, Edna O’Brien on 15 December, and so naturally I turn to my own birthday. May 9 is blank except for the note: ‘The first British self-service launderette is opened on Queensway, London 1949.’4 ...”

“... strong, warm and macerated in phlegm. He had the genial, tannin glaze of a resting Stone: Ronnie Wood morphing into Bill Wyman. A heavy silver wedding ring. The ever-present mobile phone. I’d given Mr Nice a first reading. And that’s how Marks presented himself. How he charmed the uncharmable, the warders at Terre Haute Penitentiary: his ‘usual trick ...”