“... from its very shipshapeness’ – setting out to sea. Among its contents we hearVoices too of Frost and Wallace StevensOff a Caedmon double album, off different shelves.Dylan at full volume, the Bushmills killed.‘Do Not Go Gentle’. ‘Don’t be going yet.’Heavy as the gate I hung on onceAs it swung its arc through air round to the hedge-back,The ...”

“... lying there with a broken neck.Millay rose to fame while still in her twenties. She beat Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens for the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. Although she became a proselytiser in her last decade, devoted to progressive causes to which she fitted her verses (‘not poems, posters,’ she admitted), she was still in demand for lectures and ...”

“... although his illustrious admirers have ranged from Virginia Woolf to Derek Walcott, from Robert Frost to W.H. Auden, from Thomas Hardy to T.S. Eliot, not to speak of confrères such as Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke and Henry Newbolt. Ezra Pound, although savage in his denunciation of the use of idioms or phrases such as ‘dim lands of peace’ – locutions ...”

“... that in autumn, when the grapes Made sharp air sharper by their smell These had a being, breathing frost; And least will guess that with our bones We left much more, left what still is The look of things, left what we felt At what we saw. The children blithely picking up the bones of their ancestors, unaware of and indifferent to the sensual fullness of ...”

“... roughly from east to west, the ‘West’ was a cultural as well as a geographical experience. To Mark Twain, whose letters from Nevada and California form the bulk of this long-awaited and deftly-annotated edition by the Mark Twain Project at Berkeley, the West presented economic and social, as well as ...”

“... its bounds. He might say, for he surely knows, that it was Manchester, where he first made his mark, that taught Oxford to value research in history. Before it succumbed to the Manchester influence, the dons in Oxford spent their summers reading the research of others, in various languages, and then in term instilled the conclusions into their ...”

“... silly if we do not amble in the sun while we can, before time elbows us into everlasting night & frost.‘Begin afresh, afresh, afresh’, as the last line of ‘The Trees’ (1967) would put it. But Larkin too was involved in a lifelong battle with melancholia: ‘bloody awful tripe,’ he wrote on the manuscript of this uplifting paean to spring, as if ...”

“... pterodactyls. In the drafts, the bird’s ‘heavy flight’ eventually carries her ‘through the frost-clouded air/to the great rock where/the loved one really lives’. More mystical associations clustered round the owl. As a child, Bishop once dreamed about an owl seated on the back of a rabbit. While at Vassar she related this dream to Margaret Miller, a ...”

“... Sirrah, you are an impudent fellow ... The Recorder: You are a factious fellow: I will set a mark on you ... The Mayor: I will cut his nose ... This did not sufficiently strengthen the jury, so they were hauled off to prison for the failure to convict. On appeal, the jury was vindicated, and the precedent was established of the jury’s power to ...”

“... means ‘prince’. He does not personally appear in the novel: standing in for him is his cousin, Mark Ukacierra, the ‘steward of the blood’. The servants are all terrified of him, and his obsessive devotion to the law of the blood feud verges on mania. His greatest fear is that the feuding will cease, that the blood will dry up: ‘On March 16 there were ...”

“... it the bicentennial of the French Revolution. Well over a hundred international colloquia will mark the occasion. They will range from platitudinous immensities – ‘the rights of man’, ‘Europe and America after the fall of the Bastille’, ‘the French Revolution and the Third World’ – to genuinely worthwhile specificities (‘music and drama ...”

“... of the details (eyelashes linked with butterfly – lips linked with salivary glands) being a mark of instinctive craftsmanship. But the poem is somehow spoiled by the portentous exclamation (‘o death’) which opens the second stanza – the kind of thing a fainting diva would cry out with one hand pressed to her forehead. The book contains many ...”

“... of her life by Bamber Gascoigne, and then David Attenborough’s reading of two poems by Robert Frost. There appears to have been a Feddenesque delicacy and some well-placed dabs of humour to the whole affair. ‘Very Mary,’ Catherine said. The phrase ‘order of service’ isn’t Catholic. I never heard it in the chapels of my youth (we had Mass, not ...”

“... which are in the Caribbean, were too shy or too polite ever to tell their Imperial masters that frost and snow were unknown to them, and that the white mounds were heaps of the only product that made money in Turks and Caicos: salt. By the time the Turks and Caicos got their mad flag, most Victorians in the home country thought of salt, if they thought of ...”

“... allowed.’ Mihail turned away, uncomplaining, and waited for two hours in the early-morning frost while I queued to buy food. But then, all the people I was in line with were Romanians – Romanians with the right connections. It’s not only in the special shops that you can procure food. The markets this summer have been piled high with ...”