“... spartan, blame the Bursar but then, the point of Parnassus was never the upholstery. Besides the hope is that undergraduates will find their way up the stairs to sit not in the chairs but at these famous feet. But remember, we are not asking the great man to do. His doing after all is mostly done. No. We are asking him to be. Count the poet’s presence here ...”

“... to return to it,’ Neal Ascherson wrote in the Scottish political review Q in 1975. The historian Christopher Harvie described the emigrant intellectuals who pepper Scottish history as ‘red Scots’: ‘cosmopolitan, self-avowedly “enlightened” and, given a chance, authoritarian, expanding into and exploiting greater and more bountiful fields than their ...”

“... populist tactics and goals away from their original agrarian focus. Although they continued to hope for a rising of the common folk, their practical emphasis was now on the constitutionalist objectives they shared with their liberal allies rather than the peasant-socialist economic agenda on which they had once focused. They hoped to spark a broader revolt ...”

“... was at least 200 million, roughly a quarter of the global population. He lived in the age of what Christopher Bayly called Britain’s ‘imperial meridian’, when colonial elites became preoccupied with property, settlement, improvement and population. Which is another way of saying that they became more Malthusian. Malthus’s influence can be seen after ...”

“... only his name but his age as well. Larkin at Sixty can’t therefore do anything but make a reader hope for just that: a Portrait of the Artist. There are, it is true, a handful of pleasantly occasional photographs, and what seems in reproduction a surprisingly bad drawing of the poet, but the text may foil anyone whose ‘Larkin’ is the author of the three ...”

“... beStill the indomitable Irishry.Yeats died on 28 January 1939. Two days earlier, W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood had arrived in New York. When Auden heard of Yeats’s death, he sought to ascertain what time of the day or night he had died. He was planning a poem. What preoccupied him most in 1939 was guilt that his gift for poetry was serving ...”

“... to swim municipally? Tomorrow we leave as the house is now sold, putting me in mind of Francis Hope’s poem about the holidays we had in rented villas back in the 1970s: Goodbye to the Villa Piranha Prepare the journey North, Smothering feet in unfamiliar socks. Sweeping the bathroom free of sand, collecting Small change of little worth. Make one last ...”

“... and I believe it to be, in the end, false. The response of the young was less critical. Christopher lsherwood went as an undergraduate to Richards’s lectures and hailed him as ‘the prophet we have been waiting for ... To us, he was infinitely more than a brilliantly new literary critic; he was our guide, our evangelist, who revealed to us, in a ...”

“... was.’ Such apocalyptic language attached itself to Henry in 1610-12, not least in the hope expressed to the Prince in 1611 by Samson Lennard, who had fought with Sidney at Zutphen, that he might ‘live to march over the Alps, and to trail a pike before the walls of Rome, under your highness’ standard’. In the same way, Greville’s belief ...”

“... in the critical population has produced. So it seems, at any rate, to my generation. Recently Christopher Norris has been meditating, with his usual tact, the resemblances and differences between the Empson of The Structure of Complex Words and the Paul de Man of Allegories of Reading – a sign, perhaps, that the most neglected (and most theoretical) of ...”

“... solemn music as to approach the clerihew, something about which Hill makes a knowing joke: ‘Sir Christopher Wren, in or around the year seventeen ten, went to dine with some men, memorially, with a view to re-edifying the clerihew.’ Wren went to dine with some men in a clerihew by E.C. Bentley, the inventor of the form: ‘He said, “if anyone calls/Say ...”

“... which Auden himself posed in his delightful short poem ‘Orpheus’: ‘What does the song hope for?’ ‘To be bewildered and happy/Or most of all the knowledge of life?’ Auden’s own unsatisfactory resolution of a similar crux, his famous revision of ‘or’ to ‘and’ in the line ‘We must love one another or die,’ may suggest a quick ...”

“... only way to make sense of Prince, but to try and make sense of him without it is a truly forlorn hope. Yet, to my knowledge, the only critic who ever tackled the subject head on is the writer Carol Cooper, an African American woman who had also worked in the music industry. In an astute piece for the Face in June 1983 (it includes a wholly imaginary Q&A with ...”

“... a large enough subject. Or perhaps it is too abstract a subject. The middle stanza blazes, and we hope that the poem will go on to make something of it. But it does not. The final stanza resumes the deep quibbling of the first; the material is exchanged for the immaterial. If a poetic connection of sorts with Mandelstam has been made (and apologised for), a ...”

“... justice, and partly because a generation bereft of political memory has cynically abandoned all hope for the ‘centre’. Like most US feminism, post-colonialism is a way of being politically radical without necessarily being anti-capitalist, and so is a peculiarly hospitable form of leftism for a ‘post-political’ world. Gayatri Spivak, by ...”