“... pause, and the tone and air with which he answered, “It is a haggard existence!”’ Mark Storey, Southey’s most recent biographer, gently describes him as ‘less than completely stable’, and his poetry is a product of his genius for repression, as the handsome and welcome new edition of the verse lets us see with new clarity. No one in the ...”

“... of the origin of the world, but of the origin of evil, of human suffering and death, in which the mark of man’s rebelliousness is in part his sheer fertility. It is like peering into the crucible of theodicy. Notwithstanding the enormous difference of monotheism, we see something very similar in the early chapters of Genesis (the Israelites would have ...”

“... the first Glanmore sonnet, that he is ‘quickened with a redolence/Of farmland as a dark unblown rose’? The poet himself had doubts, as can be seen from his pruning back in Field Work of the even plusher ‘redolence/Of the fundamental dark unblown rose’ used in Hedge School. It is as though, by opening up a longer ...”

“... took place against a background of right-wing death squads and threatened military coups. He rose quickly in the eyes of Haitians, but his stock plummeted in the United States. The New York Times, which relies heavily on informants who can speak English or French, had few kind words for him. ‘He’s a cross between the Ayatollah and Fidel,’ one ...”

“... some pleasure in the middle. I call the parts ‘pleasure’, ‘terror’ and ‘routine’ to mark the fact that for me in those years routine too was a kind of emotion. Pleasure erupted into my life when fine weather allowed me to arrive on the pier, and I was allowed to walk up and down the row of black and silver boxes, which were arranged along the ...”

“... clothes, he revels in self-multiplication: ‘Brother, that’s I; that sits for me. Do you mark it? And I must stand here ready to make away myself yonder – I must sit to be killed and stand to kill myself. I could vary it not so little as thrice over again. ’T’as some eight returns like Michaelmas term.’ The dark surreal farce of this moment ...”

“... to reach Glasgow directly. Port Glasgow found its future as a shipbuilding town, making its mark in industrial history and the pantheon of Scottish innovation by launching Europe’s first commercial steamship, the Comet, in 1812. Migrant workers arrived from the Highlands and the rural Lowlands, and especially from the place Victorian writers nicely ...”

“... of gannets’ skins, and were said to look like “feathered Mercuries”.’ Sometimes brogues rose above the knee, like fisherman’s waders: clearly their rusticity defined them, not their shape. These serviceable homemade brogues could translate a labourer into a nymph, a shepherd into a dweller in Arcadia; they were brimming over with the spirit of ...”

“... We Have that They Don’t: Anglo-American Poetic Relations since the War’, organised by Mark Ford and Steve Clark under the aegis of the University of London. Few 20th-century events, even in literary history alone, were at once important and relatively harmless. One was the rise and fall of Anglo-American literature. I use the term, in what may be ...”

“... these systems isn’t trivial; it stitches into long-standing ethical debates. My young nieces, Rose and Claude, argue about whether or not they should say please and thank you to the family Alexa. Claude says it’s good to be polite because being polite is good, while Rose says it doesn’t matter because robots ...”

“... in farming communities reported experiencing orgasm as a result of animal contact, a number that rose to 65 per cent in some rural settings. In his study of American women in 1953, Kinsey found that just under 4 per cent had engaged in sexual activity with an animal since adolescence; almost all these cases involved dogs or cats. In 1974, the sexologist ...”

“... painting’s fault? Has it got something to do with how seeing normally proceeds, and with what mark-making consists in – Jeffrey Morgan’s mark-making – as a materialisation of seeing? Carson decides he wants to see Morgan’s painting in a better ...”

“... young man … There runs through all he says and does that vein of irony by which we may so often mark one of life’s self-acknowledged failures … a man of parts without character and with more wit than sense.’ The actor offers no comment, but by now he doesn’t need to. David Gates, the creator of these connoisseurs of disappointment and ...”

“... back in the past, but not so far back that humans weren’t present to be affected, sea levels rose to drown what’s known as Doggerland, create the North Sea and cut off Britain and Ireland from the European continent and each other. It’s not surprising, then, that we can see evidence of massive changes of behaviour: long barrows giving way to stone ...”

“... after a violent whirlwind ensued, which blew down nearly every house in the village … The sea rose nearly twelve feet higher than it had ever been known to do before … sweeping away houses and every thing within its reach … there were certainly not fewer than twelve thousand individuals in Tomboro and Pekáté at the time of the eruption, of whom only ...”