“... during his childhood her ill-health took precedence over his. While she was cossetted, the sickly Lewis (as he was then called) was left to the charge of ‘Cummy’, the nurse who slept in his room until he was ten and who drove him into night terrors that only she could calm. Her entertainments amounted to a non-stop Hammer movie – ‘blood-curdling tales ...”

“... imports. The poetry section is still weirder: Larkin one can understand, from Hamilton; also Alun Lewis, Roy Fuller, Frost and Graves. But Wilbur and Merrill, Heaney and Motion? I’m not surprised there’s little evidence of attachment to their work, just oblique dismay. For any sort of poetic credo, you have to go back to the poems, or the essays in A ...”

“... the site of his first (and only) spate of serious archival research and of his meeting with Margaret Adams, the well-to-do music student who would become his first wife. Ambition and strong recommendations won Taylor a teaching post at Manchester in 1930, where he wrote his first books on Continental diplomacy, began reviewing for the Guardian, played a ...”

“... monks. Similarly, to call medieval poems like ‘Adam lay y-bounden’ and Skelton’s ‘Merry Margaret’ light is to seem to suggest that this all-too-sophisticated, even decadent culture must be, because distant, something like quaint – that Merry Margaret lived in Merrie England. And if this is true of Skelton, how ...”

“... of volumes individually devoted to Pound’s letters not only to fellow writers such as Wyndham Lewis, E.E. Cummings, Ford Madox Ford, Louis Zukofsky and William Carlos Williams, but also to various editors and patrons: to the somewhat mysterious Margaret Cravens, a Paris-based piano student from Madison, Indiana, who in ...”

“... in the continuing vitality of literature, including Yeats, Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. The writers, clustered in clubs or ‘gangs’, wanted to redraw the cultural map. The Victorians were moribund, their prosody stalled at the level of Felicia Hemans’s ‘Casabianca’, a paean to obedience that filled the ...”

“... that Shelley published – Original Poetry; by Victor and Cazire (1810), Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson (1810) – his broadsheet, The Devil’s Walk (1812), and a fascinating book-length poem he did not manage to publish: ‘The Wandering Jew; or, The Victim of the Eternal Avenger’ (written 1809-10). There are also ‘Ten Early Poems’, most ...”

“... Labour Party cherishes its great partnerships – Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Douglas and Margaret Cole, the Callaghans, the Kinnocks, the Blairs. In this pantheon the touchingly loyal team of Michael and Jill may confidently be placed.’ ‘Michael and Jill’: how cosy. It seems unfair to bracket Glenys Kinnock, say, with Beatrice Webb and ...”

“... Some time​ in 1979, after the death of Sid Vicious and before the enthronement of Margaret Thatcher, Vivienne Westwood ‘lost interest’ in punk. She and her lover Malcolm McLaren had been at the heart of the British version: they had dreamed up much of the look, the attitude and the lyrics, though not the sound ...”

“... for her a new plot, outside the accepted romantic tradition. Her authors are Dorothy Sayers, Margaret Kennedy, Muriel Jaeger, Doreen Wallace, Vera Brittain, Winifred Holtby. In Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby: A Working Partnership, Jean Kennard looks at their experiment in friendship as an idea of ‘the second self, someone close enough to be ...”

“... Not every well-bred Scots lady can identify a greasy Syriac palimpsest at breakfast, but Agnes Lewis had no doubts. In 1894 the rescued document created much excitement, not least because it seemed to show Joseph as the natural father of Jesus. Agnes tried to explain this away, but was not too embarrassed; like her sister, Maggie Gibson, she was enjoying ...”

“... The family, stuff of novelists as different as Rose Macaulay and James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Lewis Grassic Gibbon, is absent from much great poetry of the early 20th century. T.S. Eliot’s parents, a religious poet and a businessman, produced between them a businessman-religious poet, and meant an enormous amount to him ...”

“... to Members’ Allowances, it’s not surprising that most MPs seem to have followed the example of Margaret Beckett, who confessed: ‘I just grabbed together the relevant things and bunged them into the Fees Office and left it to them to sort it out.’ So Gerald Kaufman, having spent £8865 on a Bang & Olufsen 40” BeoVision LCD TV, described by its ...”

“... Saturday night and was killed. Mr Roberts, who was 69 years of age, was a brother of the late Mr Lewis Roberts, of Plershendre, Aberystwith, and both had been engaged for many years in the building trade in London. Mr Richard Roberts was an original member of the London County Council. The contents of his will made it into the Times, too, on 1 ...”

“... world makes itself continuously felt in these letters. A parade of distinguished visitors, from Margaret Fuller Ossoli to Goethe’s grandson, pays court to the Brownings in Florence. On a sojourn in Paris, the poets finally manage a much anticipated meeting with George Sand, who – greatly to Arabella’s disapproval, apparently – begins their ...”