“... his would-be resurrectors. The same melancholy afflicts his most authoritative modern biographer, James Anderson Winn: ‘Any candid teacher of English literature must admit that many students find little pleasure or stimulation in those few selections from Dryden we now ask them to read.’ The difficulty is not confined to students, or to recent times. ‘I ...”

“... one depicting a man, the other a child. The man is an affable-looking chap, reminiscent of Phil Hopkins, a percussionist at the repro Globe on Bankside. The head-and-shoulders format allows us to see that he is wearing a fancy late Elizabethan doublet with an unusual semi-transparent lace collar. He has fashionably shortish brown hair, a fairly high ...”

“... in four months in 1793, begins with Jesse Lazear, head of the clinical laboratories at Johns Hopkins Medical School. He was one of three American doctors who volunteered as guinea pigs on an expedition to Cuba in 1900 to test the theory, widely ridiculed, that mosquitoes spread the disease. He caught yellow fever and died; the link was soon proved and ...”

“... close like that, as though slipping out of poetry and back into the life that preceded it. Henry James​ , who was fascinated by Browning, spoke in an obituary piece about ‘the bristling surface of his actuality’: stylistically, the poetry is full of bristles, musically rough and jagged, full of dashes and exclamation marks, syntactically ...”

“... of effort and attention, and the place from which ... emanate the fiats of the will’, in William James’s words. This seems very plausible. Suppose the seven elements capture the conceptual core of the ordinary human sense of the self. The question then arises whether they are all essential to anything counting as a genuine sense of the self. I will ...”

“... genius. In fact Draper’s slogan was first used by Lucky Strike not in 1960 but in 1917. Claude Hopkins based a famous set of ads for Schlitz beer on a visit to the brewery, where he discovered that they washed and sanitised their bottles with steam. ‘His hosts assured him that every brewery did the same,’ as Martin Mayer recounts it in Madison ...”

“... to blame, because with his genius of mind there went an untameable insolence of behaviour. Henry James met the 36-year-old Peirce in Paris in 1875, and reported to his brother William back in Boston that ‘he is a very good fellow & one must appreciate his mental ability, but he has too little social talent ... too little art of making himself ...”

“... Artist Waiting in a Country House’, a sophisticated meditative poem to be read alongside James Fenton’s ‘A Vacant Possession’. The title poem of St Kilda’s Parliament two years later set the tone for another politically conscious and responsible collection. The poem ‘returns’ to a photograph taken of the men of St Kilda in 1879, fifty ...”

“... Odd Man Out, which was released in 1947. Bethnal Green masquerades as an expressionist Belfast. James Mason is an IRA gunman on the run. Twenty years later, his Hollywood career in decline, Mason returned once more to an East End of smoky pubs, dark shadows, charity hostels, to narrate a documentary version of Geoffrey Fletcher’s The London Nobody ...”

“... failure are the subject of a recent study, Not One Inch, by M.E. Sarotte, a historian at Johns Hopkins and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.* The title refers to the assurance on the limits of Nato expansion given to Mikhail Gorbachev by James Baker, then US secretary of state, in 1990. The Soviet Union had ...”

“... the barley takes on an additional poignancy from the cacophony before it (by Dylan Thomas out of Hopkins) and chiming silliness after it, like Auden’s pastiche of Hopkins in The Orators. To say this is to register a failure of Nicholson’s regionality and shrewd ingenuousness, for nothing could be more remote from these ...”

“... and a movement to legislate gradual emancipation. Ministers such as the Yale-educated Samuel Hopkins revised Jonathan Edwards’s theological vision, making Christian benevolence the foundation of his denunciations of slavery as a ‘mortal personal and social sin’. In a sermon of 1776, Hopkins exhorted his ...”

“... wholes; it was, one critic said, as if he were developing a photographic negative. Gerard Manley Hopkins thought that Whistler excelled in his feeling for ‘what I call inscape (the very soul of art)’, and one imagines him as keeping a given ‘inscape’ inviolable and intact over months or years. The upshot seems to be that this notorious swaggerer ...”

“... Randall Jarrell’s possible suicide, Bill’s own depression. And I talked to him about William James’s own breakdown and his resuscitation through faith. What in hell am I doing with all these theatre types? Alfred Kazin’s journals, 26 December 1986 Discount Kazin’s weary, load-bearing sigh in this characteristic entry from his journals, which ...”

“... is the artist’s conscience, the duty to make sense of it all, the pressure of form as Henry James apprehended it: ‘really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.’ In ‘Primer Class’, Elizabeth ...”