“... The radical edge to writing on convicts has long since been blunted by those historians whom Robert Hughes, in his epic The Fatal Shore (a tour de force which showed that the expatriate can instruct the locals), labelled as the ‘normalisers’. To expunge the convict stain, the normalisers play down the violence and horror of the transportation ...”

“... and then he’ll get you.’ In the end, of course, time runs out for the dastardly Hook. Ted Hughes makes use of the story in his poem ‘Tick Tock Tick Tock’, from Remains of Elmet (1979), though with two important differences: the timepiece is now alarmed, and it’s Peter who’s in danger. Somebody else acted Peter Pan. I swallowed an alarm clock ...”

“... beginnings. Certain discriminations are established from the outset. Any close resemblance between Hughes’s method and the methods of Sir James Frazer or René Girard is explained and discounted. The mere thought of Frazer prompts unavoidable and dismissive allusions to George Eliot’s Casaubon and his ‘Key to All Mythologies’, a ‘beguiling and ...”

“... off it recalling: ‘Bosley was quite keen on me.’ What on earth were they looking for – Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin, Seamus Heaney and Charles Causley – that they should have rated Bosley’s heart-warming dexterity (feelingful as well as formal) below, for instance, 18 solid unpunctuated pages of pornographic daydream: Kenneth Bernard’s ‘The ...”

“... poetry today’ – should have told John Haffenden in an interview for Viewpoints that he found Robert Frost’s fable of imagined unlived lives, ‘The Road Not Taken’, exemplary. If Fenton’s distinction between the narrative kinds is just, so is the note of regret and rebellion that he strikes in the phrase ‘deliberately excluded from ...”

“... made-up. Anyone who finds his poems flat or prosaic might consider Edward Thomas’s defence of Robert Frost: ‘if his work were printed [as prose] it would have little in common with the kind of prose that runs to blank verse ... It is poetry because it is better than prose.’ A New Path to the Waterfall is poetry because it is better than prose. Another ...”

“... wit and humour to protect itself against the failure of its search; and what the art critic Robert Hughes calls (in a different context) a ‘prophylactic irony’ to obscure the poet’s exact attitude to his statements, making his own uncertainty itself uncertain. Such games, and indeed such rigours, are quite unnecessary to a work like Omeros ...”

“... not base a car plant in Britain if Labour won the election, which was a lie; the Express said that Robert Hughes MP was affiliated to the Soviet Friendship Society, which was another lie; the Sun tried to swing the Chesterfield by-election with a fraudulent ‘psychiatric analysis’ of Tony Benn. Henry Porter, once again displaying a complete disregard ...”

“... the pursuit of political life. It is within this context of political mentalities that Jonathan Hughes situates his study of the Duke of York’s charismatic eldest son, Edward IV. Edward has always received a mixed historiographical press. Contemporaries recognised and celebrated his energy, intelligence and good fortune, but gave due weight as well to his ...”

“... what they enjoyed together was ‘more affection than between lovers in the best kind’. Lucy Hughes-Hallett wonders, in her biography of Buckingham, if chiefs of staff or special advisers can be understood as favourites, but really there is no modern equivalent. The royal favourite flourished at the early modern European court. Amphibious creatures, they ...”

“... In May 1804, at the age of 18, Benjamin Robert Haydon left his home in Plymouth and set off for London to become a great artist. His mother was distraught, his father furious, but there was no doubt in Haydon’s mind either of his vocation or of his genius. He could have worked in his father’s bookshop and inherited a secure, independent income but he didn’t want to ...”

“... though, face all ways. And it could still be your best girl referred to, or the Virgin Mary. Ted Hughes wrote a poem for the same place on the same occasion, incised in stone, in the square with Larkin’s. The poem does not feature in this handsome slim collection, at least I don’t think it does, for Hughes was not the ...”

“... and then, coming towards the nearer end of the line, the dark, odd and uncouth figure of Ted Hughes. In the superb doorstop of his Collected Poems, Hughes comes across as a more diverse poet than I remembered, and in many ways a more sympathetic and engaging presence. But it’s true that a good many of his poems ...”

“... Between leaving school and going to Cambridge, Ted Hughes did his National Service in the RAF. Writing from RAF West Kirby, in the Wirral, to a friend, Edna Wholey, in 1949 – characteristically there is no date on the letter – he exults in the wild weather:Edna, I’ve seen rain and I tell you this isn’t rain, – a steady river, well laced with ice, tempest and thunder, covers all this land, and what isn’t concrete has reverted to original chaos of mud water fire and air ...”

“... separated the theatres, one behind the other, on a vast paved piazza. But something there is, as Robert Frost says, that does not like a wall. From any angle, these schemes suggested disguised factories for making some plebeian product – meat pies, perhaps – inexplicably thrusting out of the harbour, the same problem that had inspired the soon to be ...”