“... Auden said in an interview a few months before he died. Thanks to the magnificent efforts of Edward Mendelson, it’s now all here: prose, plays, libretti and, finally, the poems, coming to just over 7500 pages all told. Sizing up these volumes, one might take courage from a line in ‘The Labyrinth’: ‘Assume this maze has got a plan.’ Many maps ...”

“... to be made, given that relations remained so close for so long? Presumably, we have Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826, ‘revolutionary politician and president of the United States’) but not Dwight Eisenhower because the former was born in what was still a British colony, though the latter spent more time in this country and arguably had a greater ...”

“... what sort of heroine she was going to be. When she had finished a 65,000-word novel celebrating Edward Sackville, a modest hero of the Civil War, she added a coy ‘author’s note’ – she was then 14 – in which she wondered whether he could see her and if he knew ‘how I wish to be like him’. (This coyness is infectious: Mrs Glendinning in her ...”

“... wronged.Mary Ellen was a novelist’s daughter as well as a novelist’s wife; her father was Thomas Love Peacock. As a youthful walker and talker and poet and witty novelist, Peacock seemed unlikely to find gainful employment (Shelley helped him out when he was imprisoned for debt). He liked women and lived with his clever mother; he fell in love, was ...”

“... as James suggested. They set up an 80-foot maypole, topped by deer antlers. A lawyer called Thomas Morton became the local Lord of Misrule. William Bradford, the governor of the colony, viewed this revival of the ancient Bacchanalia with horror. Armed men arrested Morton, who was sent back to England, and the maypole was chopped down the following ...”

“... order was therefore an individual and a societal imperative. Tyndall’s main inspiration was Thomas Carlyle, along with transcendental idealist philosophers such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Ralph Waldo Emerson. (Carlyle was Tyndall’s supporter at his wedding in 1876, Tyndall a pallbearer at Carlyle’s funeral in 1881.) To labour towards higher ...”

“... edition of the Quran in Latin, and wrote the preface when it appeared. But for Catholics like Thomas More, it was Luther who was Muhammad, in his iconoclasm and his lust, a priest who took a wife and bid Protestant clergymen to do the same. Or it was Calvin: a Catholic almanac depicted Satan with one claw on the turbaned prophet’s shoulder, the other ...”

“... couplets was an achievement unattempted by anyone before and unachieved by anyone since, including Thomas Creech in 1682. Lucy’s first children, twin sons, were born in 1639; she was last pregnant in 1662, so her children may have frequented the schoolroom for rather more than twenty years; her translation of Lucretius could have taken her as long. Though ...”

“... its own building, an International Style box clad in white marble designed by Philip Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone, on 53rd Street. A significant extension has followed every twenty years or so, each coolly modernist in style – totally abstract, highly engineered, fiercely refined, elegantly branded. The first was conceived by Philip Johnson in 1964, the ...”

“... Edward Thompson’s Customs in Common is described as a ‘companion volume’ to his The Making of the English Working Class, and rises to the occasion. It has the wide range of reference, the densely-textured documentation, a special quality of charged impressionism (sometimes tendentious, more often honourably concerned with generous perspectives and panoramic insight), the embattled moral fervour, which established the earlier book as a classic of historical scholarship and indeed of English letters ...”

“... paranoia, and – in particular – of the ministrations of Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays, the father of public relations, who was on the payroll of United Fruit, one of the US’s largest corporations.The players are exaggerated, almost parodic, even in the history books. There is the adman making a pitch to get involved in ...”

“... don and college man with secrets and a principle of reserve – or with the peremptoriness of Edward Lear. Parker cites, as a grotesquerie, one of the earliest reviews of A Shropshire Lad by an American critic who decided it was all an elaborate joke, with Housman as the lachrymose Mock-Turtle (‘Bless you he haint got no sorrows. It’s only his ...”

“... For Sir Thomas Browne it was a commonplace that ‘the number of the dead long exceedeth all that shall live.’ But this is no longer necessarily true, as has been pointed out in these pages before now: there may be more people living now than all the people who have ever died. With over 5.4 billion of us alive today, on course to become 8 ...”

“... examined the child, claimed to have detected promise of mathematical genius. Moving on to King Edward VI Grammar School in Aston, Reed specialised in Classics. Since Greek was not taught, he taught himself, and went on to win the Temperley Latin prize and a scholarship to Birmingham University. There he was taught and befriended – as were his Birmingham ...”

“... by authorial complaints against Olwyn Hughes, Ted Hughes and the Estate (e.g. David Holbrook, Edward Butscher) or have come to nothing (e.g. Lois Ames, Harriet Rosenstein). Most of the book-length literary criticism is unimpressive. There isn’t much to choose, for example, between Margaret Dickie Uroff (‘As they developed, Plath came to locate herself ...”