“... or silenced. A particularly flagrant example has been the shameful concerted hounding of Professor Geoffrey Blainey. The republican aspiration keeps mainly illiberal company now, and disapproves of most Australian realities. Our republic of letters has become pretty much a Soviet one, not precisely in its ideology – being Broad Left, the line is not ...”

“... to the Music of Time; and the memoirs, journals and journalism. Afternoon Men might not be the best of the early books, but on the other hand it might, and it’s certainly characteristic of the world and manner of the period – like Waugh’s Decline and Fall it has the attractive bloom of first-book freshness. It is told mainly in dialogue; it describes ...”

“... the permanent literary consciousness,’ says O’Brien almost ruefully, noting also that what is best in Larkin is ‘largely lost among his many imitators’. But what nobody (including the editors of these anthologies) asks is why we spend so much time complaining about Little Englandism, cynical restraint and suburban Toryism while persisting in raising ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... his local superior with his lackadaisical ways and tendency to drown his sorrows. Even on his best behaviour, Meadows seems to have a gift for bringing out the awkwardness in any social situation: Mrs Mackellar, his dour landlord’s dourer wife, reads his tea-leaves and predicts dire peril for those close to him; visiting him at his cottage, Gill manages ...”