“... through in his disputatious works: ‘I mean not to dispute Philosophy with this Pork, who never read any.’ Certainly he knew too much about more or less everything. He was steeped in classical poetry and almost every line he wrote is in close conversation with one source or another. His relationship to Ovid, beautifully explored in a recent book by Maggie ...”

“... don who must have recruited them. In 1977 the Times proclaimed to a sceptical public that he was Donald Beves, the delightful tutor of King’s known to generations of undergraduates who performed on stage in the ADC, the Marlowe or the Musical Society, and whose interest in politics or indeed in ideas was negligible: clearly his bonhomie disguised an ...”

“... Stead’s book. It is his second go at the subject, and comes 24 years after his first and much read book, The New Poetic. He wants to revise some of the opinions expressed there, especially concerning Yeats, whom he wants to move down, and Pound, whom he wants to move up. The lever employed in these operations is Modernism. ‘Something called Modernism ...”

“... selection of ‘The Artist Waiting in a Country House’, a sophisticated meditative poem to be read alongside James Fenton’s ‘A Vacant Possession’. The title poem of St Kilda’s Parliament two years later set the tone for another politically conscious and responsible collection. The poem ‘returns’ to a photograph taken of the men of St Kilda in ...”

“... out: ‘Look at me! … Don’t you think I’m beautiful?’ In fact, she thought he looked like Donald Duck, and insisted he put his clothes on and take her to meet André Breton. ‘There has only been one really good edition of anything that Shakespeare wrote,’ he told the writer Ruthven Todd, ‘and that is an edition of Venus and Adonis that I did ...”

“... end of his life he edited a volume called Man and His Symbols (1964). The radical Freud most of us read today was less interested than Jung in the idea of a collective unconscious, but the historical Freud dallied with it in his discussions of the symbol, especially after 1914, finding common ground between dreams and myths, legends, folk tales and linguistic ...”

“... of this journalistic balancing act, keeping ‘that part of the British public, which had eyes to read and minds to understand, aware of what was going on in Germany’.Ebbutt had returned home unwell. ‘Before being expelled,’ he later wrote,I had had warnings of my state of health, but not, until afterwards looking back, of the catastrophe which befell ...”

“... Hannah More blamed their editors for the decay of morals: to let people assume that you had read the entire work from which an anthology piece was excerpted, she warned girls, was no better than lying outright. In the 1840s, less predictably, Engels took time out from The Condition of the Working Class in England to sneer at the anthologies littering ...”

“... comments on current events on Twitter in all caps, including on the threat posed to ‘our beloved Donald’ by communists. Vargas Llosa recently recalled meeting her in her homein an elegant neighbourhood in a house filled with plastic flowers where there is a photograph – that occupies an entire wall – of the Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas and a votive ...”

“... Paley’s activism but had no idea that she wrote, and vice versa – easy to understand when you read the accompanying chronology of her life, in which books and prizes take up less space than political activities. All gusto, fun and generosity, Paley emerges as a figure so appealing that she risks outshining her own fiction. Born in 1922 to Russian Jewish ...”

“... armed him to face the accumulating disasters of the century with the pugnacious resilience of a Donald Duck. The image of the Holy Fool of dissent makes a serviceable fit, here, with the popular anti-imperialism of Mark Twain, who with William James and others had organised the ‘Moratorium’ protest against America’s bullying conquest of the ...”

“... pop bottles’ was on permanent display and that ‘there are full professors in this place who read nothing but cereal boxes.’ Never have so many read so much into so little. Mythic symbols – and the dinosaur undoubtedly is one – survive in a broad range of cultural forms. This, to me, is what makes the field of ...”

“... reactions in Eliot which are not patently any such thing. To say this, is to agree restively with Donald Davie, who has praised Ackroyd’s book for demonstrating Eliot’s essential commonplaceness. To Davie, though, this makes the book valuable as the exposure of something lamentable, whereas others of us may judge it to be – both in Eliot’s life and in ...”

“... the detail. His book cannot, therefore, be summarised by the reviewer for the reader: it has to be read. But it is important to notice that Rorty is not claiming that he has summed up the force and the outcome merely of the central arguments of recent American analytic philosophy. For he believes that precisely the same morals are to be drawn from the modern ...”

“... by the poet’s enthusiastic disciples? And this scepticism soon led to more serious charges. Donald Davie was one critic who insisted that Eliot, not only in the early poems but just as dangerously in Four Quartets, had turned English poetry off its proper course. The debate continues. Eliot’s stock seems at present rather low. The second curve, the ...”