“... MPs and not always against marginal Labour MPs either, and many individual candidates doing their best to signal their distance from their own party leadership – the possible outcomes of the election have resolved themselves into a binary choice. Either Johnson wins a majority, in which case the UK will almost certainly leave the EU on 31 January 2020. Or ...”

“... Eleanor grows close to Fulk’s daughter, Alyson – a reimagining of Alysoun, the Wife’s best friend. (Modern retellings of the Wife of Bath often leave out the second Alysoun.) In Brooks’s version, Eleanor takes Alyson with her as she passes through her various households, and eventually realises that she needs her friend more than any man. When ...”

“... notion of their cultural inheritance. Williams’s Culture and Society (1958), still his best-known book, attempts to substitute for this narrow idea of culture his own amplified version, since it treats not poets but prose-writers, who are not aesthetes but critics of society. Other books, sometimes looking like literary criticism – Drama from ...”

“... Clearly, choosing Thomas as one’s subject is not going to be a good idea if disapproval is the best one can do; when people are not all that they might be – and Thomas seems to have been something of a genius at getting people to imagine what he might have been if he hadn’t been who he was – it is too self-regarding to be merely disappointed or ...”

“... to The Words upon the Window-Pane, come up with the names of Hugh Kenner, Denis Donoghue, Geoffrey Hill, Robert M. Adams, Michael Foot, Norman Brown, J. Middleton Murry, George Orwell, André Breton, F.R. Leavis. Said’s overlooking of most (not all) of these might strike you as a shade provincial, but they aren’t much to his point, since what he ...”

“... for his work. The dream of the sunken city supplied the setting for what is probably his best-known poem, ‘Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow’, in which the dream-field acquires a hyper-uranian aspect to become an eternal pasture folded in all thought so that there is a hall therein that is a made place, created by light wherefrom the ...”

“... self-unsounded Spirit … He is a clear piece of Water in a park, moved from without – or at best, a smooth stream with one current, & tideless, & of which you can only avail yourself to one purpose. By the time Coleridge wrote those words in 1804, Southey had become a pathologically hard worker (‘the most industrious of all literary men on ...”

“... the female English translator might become the Frenchman’s lover – they always say that the best way to learn a language is through pillow talk. As it happens, this dream was once a reality. The first known translation of Madame Bovary was undertaken from a fair copy of the manuscript by Juliet Herbert, governess to Flaubert’s niece Caroline, in ...”

“... who’d spent years carefully tracking and tracing the continuities between Hardy and Larkin and Geoffrey Hill, say, and producing learned monographs on the Movement or on Ted Hughes suddenly took the notion to write a book about Frederic Prokosch (a poet, like Day Lewis, who made most of his money from novels), or Archibald MacLeish (again, like Day ...”

“... auspicious. Auden said only one thing to Spender, which was to ask him who he thought were the best poets of the day: Spender replied ‘Humbert Wolfe’, which was obviously not the right answer. The moment, long hoped for, was, as Spender later reflected, ‘a humiliating failure’.Even so, to his surprise, Auden invited him to call round, and shortly ...”

“... The Rattle Bag. Our inherited conviction that good poems are individual, and that the best make up Virgilian careers or figures in carpets, militates against compilation. Not every culture has inherited this prejudice. In Japan, the anthologist draws on a cogent aesthetic reaching back a millennium. From the first imperial collection, Kokinshu ...”

“... afraid to rhyme “bone” with “stone”, or to go umpty-umpty-um. Marianne was doing her best, one saw, to go umpty-umpty-um when she sensed that La Fontaine had gone that way, but it seemed to be almost – I use the word again – physically impossible for her to do so.’ The endeavour to conform takes her at last to a poetry workshop run by ...”

“... these grounds, he is mistaken, for we have only to recall Derrida’s elaborate readings of Kafka, Geoffrey Hartman’s of Christopher Smart, or Barbara Johnson’s of Zora Neale Hurston, to see how much analysis of text and modification of the canon have gone into deconstructive theorising. But why should Steiner, who wants to replace commentary with ...”

“... Mozambique, discerning a policy riddled with ‘nonsense and contradictions’. Perhaps it was Sir Geoffrey Howe’s clenched fist salute in Mozambique last year which alarmed them. In fact, Britain’s policy in Southern Africa is carefully considered. Aid to Mozambique remains a cheap option compared to the economic sanctions advocated by the Commonwealth ...”

“... likely to result in our books being banned’. When an early version of the novel was submitted to Geoffrey Faber, the publisher’s response was that the book was both pornographic and libellous. Thus the manuscript gathered dust for three decades, until in the early Sixties – ‘during some financial crisis of the kind to which poets are liable’ – it ...”