“... through the waxworks of English history. Ackroyd’s early mentor J.H. Prynne, in a lecture on Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems, speaks of ‘that extraordinary poem where Blake decides to rework Milton and to arrange for the demonic possession of himself by Milton.’ ‘There are,’ he continues, ‘congestions of personality which result from that ...”

“... life. A feud between sisters? Isn’t that … female? We know about the tragic loss of her son, Charles, at the age of eleven, which means that she exists for us in grief, as a permanent mother. There is nothing so diminishing, to the canonical view, though anyone who has witnessed this sort of loss first-hand knows that it puts you among the Greeks, into ...”

“... I start crying at the informational video, which juxtaposes stiff ambassadorial footage of King Charles talking about his nonna with a female voice intoning: ‘She stood in tears amid the alien corn.’ I’M in the alien corn! The effect of poetry is reliable, still. Your skin gets a whole size smaller.Upstairs, I walk past the life-mask, with its visible ...”

“... DC. Another player made up an occasional fourth man. Isaiah Berlin was happy, at least when Charles (Chip) Bohlen was unavailable, to furnish an urbane ditto to their ruthlessness. Almost as if to show that academics and intellectuals may be tough guys, too – the most lethal temptation to which the contemplative can fall victim – Berlin’s ...”

“... in July 1970, he had another breakdown and was admitted to Greenwoods Nursing Home in St John’s Wood. This was too much for Blackwood. ‘I am going away,’ she wrote to say. ‘If I see you when you are so sick I know everything between us will become distorted and destroyed. Your sickness is so distressing to me and I am so bound up with you that I ...”

“... their civility the better to use law and force against the Irish, from Spenser’s long-haired wood kerns through the Fenians to the Hunger Strikers. ‘Heroic Styles’ (1984) proposes, equally provocatively, that Yeats and Joyce contributed to the logjam of the North. Both essays are vigilant, authoritative and tendentious, with Deane jesting about the ...”

“... callow young men should have been the first to invade the floor of the House of Commons since Charles I seems vandalism not so much of the Commons itself as of tradition, the more so because it’s in aid of such an ignoble cause. Though I feel much the same about another vandal, Lord Falconer, and the scrambled abolition of the office of lord ...”

“... a time when Isaac Butt’s leadership of the Irish Parliamentary Party was giving way to that of Charles Stewart Parnell. The club, in Dawson Street, was a place to meet and smoke and drink and discuss politics. He played an active part in the 1880 elections to the Westminster Parliament, helping ensure that the two Conservative candidates standing in his ...”

“... in it for euphemisms.Poor Bottom, an innocently dreaming egoist, a would-be artist, becomes in the wood by night what we would now call a donkey. But that word is another 18th-century euphemism. Elizabethans would have said roundly that Bottom was an ass. And they pronounced that word exactly as they said the word ‘arse’, one of their two terms for what we ...”

“... was never absent in this last decade of their lives. 14 August. Listen to the last programme in Charles Wheeler’s Radio 4 series on National Service, a discussion with, among others, Neal Ascherson, Michael Mates and Arnold Wesker. Though my own experiences (basic training in the Infantry, then the Joint Services Russian Course) were hardly typical, I ...”

“... that very day (‘Just the two of us, I promise’), and I would go along to her mews house behind Charles Street to find the tête-à-tête had turned into a party for 16, with the guests the likes of the American ambassador, Roy Jenkins, Kofi Annan and such. She never seemed 103 or anything like it and got up for an occasion looked magnificent. She was a ...”

“... Rotters’ Club.5 The last, and most famous, was the Inklings, with C.S. Lewis (‘Jack’) and Charles Williams, at Oxford in the 1930s. On this subject, Humphrey Carpenter’s 1978 study, The Inklings, last revised in 1997, is the place to start.Religion: Mabel, his widowed mother, was a Roman Catholic convert, and Tolkien at least believed that her Low ...”

“... Brothers, Tessie O’Shea, Milton Babbitt, The Rough Guide to Rai, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Charles Trenet, Ska Almighty, John Dowland, the organ music of Johann Fux (heh heh), Ian Bostridge, the Ramones, Astor Piazzola, Ethel Merman’s Disco Album, Magnetic Fields, Flagstad and Svanholm in Die Walküre, Lord Kitchener and the Calypso All-Stars, Sonic ...”

“... stage to the spot. And he was to leave him there. Just let go. And go back and bang a piece of wood against the stage to indicate to the lighting man in front of the stage to turn the lights up. And there he would be, dressed like a tramp, his eyes filled with light, his face supple, his expression charming if it were not so sad and rueful. Ready to do his ...”

“... initial hardship. Fatefully, the job she found was as an assistant to a London publisher, William Wood, who oversaw the English edition of Vogue. During the war and in the years immediately after the Armistice, British Vogue – originally only a reprint of the American edition with a few additions – had come into its own as a stand-alone publication with ...”