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“... of ‘pastiche Auden’ in his early work, but it became clearer in the 1940s that his real poetic masters were Hardy and, more indirectly, Wordsworth. By the 1950s this could have made for recognition of unobvious continuities with the disciplined mundanity of a younger poet such as Larkin rather than with either the metaphysical disjunctions of post-Eliot ...”

“... chosen subjects – the proletariat – to seize control of their world. They would be history’s masters, not its victims. Gareth Stedman Jones came across Sartre’s writings on Marxism when he was about the same age Sartre had been when he first read Marx. A Francophile in his adolescence, Stedman Jones had worked in Paris for Agence France-Presse before ...”

“... and he soon became a must-see metropolitan attraction. Joshua Reynolds painted his portrait and William Parry did an ensemble piece of Mai, Solander and Banks. Mai met the king, Dr Johnson and Fanny Burney; a play about him was performed at the Theatre Royal; he learned to play chess and backgammon, and many agreed with Mrs Thrale’s comment about the ...”

“... incunabula and rare folios, immaculately printed on large paper, bound by Jean Grolier and other masters of the book arts. They preferred unique items, though they often had to settle for the very rare.Lamb had loved his books, and the hunt for them, as much as any of those grandees. In his informal, allusive, often nostalgic Essays and Last Essays of ...”

“... triumphant eclecticism’. Among the figures he mentions are, of course, Anquetil-Duperron and Sir William Jones, the founder of Indology, whose researches on the Orient, Hinduism and the Sanskrit language include translations from – and, in effect, the recovery of – the great fourth-century Sanskrit poet Kalidasa. Yet Said is hard on Jones – ‘whereas ...”

“... parasitic organism which causes one of the world’s great killer diseases: ‘Mosquito Day’. Or William Castle (1897-1990), a young resident at Boston City Hospital who knew from earlier work that pernicious anaemia involved the production of too few red blood cells, that vast quantities of raw or slightly cooked liver resolved the problem, and that ...”

“... and before those still lodging in the rectory were dispersed, I visited the house by invitation of William Bock, who acted as spokesperson for the collective. Will, as might have been expected under the circumstances, looked pale, convalescent, chilled. He hugged himself under a poncho of blankets, drawing up his legs on the sofa, before he launched into his ...”

“... is, in a way that returns poetry to the professors even more fundamentally than was envisaged by William Carlos Williams when he complained that The Waste Land ‘gave the poem back to the academics’. Despite some scoring against the ‘academic’ character of poets like John Ashbery (whose work is described as the ‘epitome’ of the academic in a ...”

“... poetry is highly beneficial to the health of the latter, even though poetry’s most instinctive masters in any age may seem to disregard theory, or operate outside it. Davie has remarked that he wrote his theoretical books, Articulate Energy and Purity of Diction in English Verse, in order to clarify for himself how he wanted to write his own poetry. At the ...”

“... the world’s great men. Roger Scruton has done the eminent Doctor for Frank Kermode’s ‘Modern Masters’. Alas, Criminale reflects no credit on that worthy series. He is revealed as the most treasonable of clerks, a compound of Waldheim, de Man, Harry Lime and Lukacs. Thematically, Doctor Criminale shapes up as a kind of post-Maastricht version of Henry ...”

“... the war, most Northerners were willing to leave the freed slaves to the mercy of their former masters – to leave them with ‘nothing but freedom’, in Foner’s phrase. The emphasis on competing ways of organising labour, however partial and problematic, allowed interpretation to reach beyond the boundaries of moralistic uplift. Uplift had a ...”

“... it’s a variation of flavour rather than a difference between species. Guy Davenport, one of the masters of essay form, wrote two sparkling pieces a year apart on table manners, one for the Hudson Review in 1979, the other for Antaeus in 1980. Shockingly, there is no overlap between them, though cannibalising your own material is generally regarded as ...”

“... three’ of the Reinagle sisters in 1807 and noted their unsentimental approach to copying the Old Masters. ‘They work very quick, & said, “Picture painted one day; sold the next; money spent the third.”’) Training sometimes began early. Helena Beatson, Read’s niece and pupil, presented her first narrative scenes at the age of eight at the 1771 ...”

“... the basic initiation rite, were developed, Stevenson argues, in Scotland. His hero is William Schaw, master of works to James VI and the member of a feverishly intellectual court. In 1598 and 1599 Schaw issued two sets of statutes which established a system of Lodges for all Scotland. Stevenson contends that Schaw was influenced by Renaissance ...”