“... his own small corner of the country, observing every detail with care and precision – ‘a crow with something pale and long in its beak lazily flaps up from having poked a hole in a green garbage bag’ – makes living in it somehow more tolerable. The implication is not quite that the unexamined life is not worth living, rather that an unexamined ...”

“... out Milton’s regicidal politics, or David Garrick, who turned Shakespeare from upstart crow into national bard; there were theoreticians of ‘original composition’ like Edward Young, who set a premium on the rejection of classical models; there were book-trade entrepreneurs whose huge poetry anthologies cashed in on the landmark case of ...”

“... poems had impressively traversed the dead-end he seemed to have run into with the blood-drenched Crow. He appeared to have found a new line for his work, part narrative, part diary-entry, and to have discovered, too, a more coherent speaking voice, a human voice. ( Looking back, we can easily surmise that several of the poems in Birthday Letters were ...”

“... who had ruined everything, the bane of virtuous Queen Katherine, virtually the murderer of saintly Thomas More. For Protestants, she was, formally at least, the rootstock of their Reformation, and to be honoured as such. But mud sticks, and, after all, it was not the likes of Thomas More but the sacred monarch himself who ...”

“... name, about a fair in a Lincolnshire market town. When it was performed in 1908 under the baton of Thomas Beecham, it got rave reviews: ‘Mr Delius sees poetry and sentiment,’ the Daily Telegraph wrote, where ‘to the conventional eye all is harshness and frivol … The result is a work of intense feeling, pregnant with rare emotion and serene ...”

“... Nate Parker’s much hyped The Birth of a Nation, to books like Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, Jesmyn Ward’s anthology The Fire This Time, James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird and the poet Claudia Rankine’s award-winning Citizen. In a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, on receiving the MacArthur ‘Genius’ grant, Rankine acknowledged ...”

“... and the cup, 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 poems than Auden’s ...”

“... private detectives, but all to no avail. Their author, commonly known in French as Le Corbeau, the crow, remained unknown. But it was assumed that it must be a member of the Villemin clan, since it was rent with family quarrels, hatreds, jealousies and rumours. Jean-Marie Villemin, who had been more successful in his profession than most of the family (he was ...”

“... appended to his 1709 edition of the plays, was based partly on information gleaned by the actor Thomas Betterton from descendants of people who might have gossiped or drunk with Shakespeare. Rowe established many of the paradigms for later lives: he inferred the ethical characteristics of the author from his high view of the plays. Shakespeare had to be ...”

“... kind of romantic too, the seer and sage, not just naming things but naming them hermeneutically. Crow was a bird that never flew in a farmyard, and now we have ‘Prometheus on His Crag’, an all too similar cycle of 21 poems, in which Hughes’s great powers of turning the visual into the verbal disappear into a welter of ‘powerful’ imagery. Hughes ...”

“... in 1945) and Southern whites alienated by the federal government’s role in eliminating Jim Crow. All of them pegged their hopes on the Arizona Republican senator Barry Goldwater. ‘Extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice,’ Goldwater thundered at the 1964 Republican National Convention, as he accepted his party’s nomination for the ...”

“... rights intelligently. This interpretation formed part of the intellectual legitimation of the Jim Crow South, which in the late 19th century began abrogating the rights blacks had gained during Reconstruction. The supposed horrors of Reconstruction offered a stark warning of what would happen if Southern blacks were able to exercise their right to vote. But ...”

“... with questions of biography. Given the fates that overtook his colleagues Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd in 1593 and 1594 – the one stabbed to death at 29, the other eventually dying after an extensive and painful interrogation – you could argue that Shakespeare might have felt that he had been living on borrowed time since the age of thirty. Ben ...”

“... some unfortunate girl into doing things with what he euphemistically calls his chose, he can crow as loudly as Alan Clark. When his unfortunate wife, Elizabeth, finally discovers him with his hand up the skirt of her companion Deborah Willet, he is duly remorseful about being caught, but is rather pleased with himself for being able with perfect ...”

“... that mention Chaucer than any other premodern poet: 493 of them, meticulously compiled by Martin Crow and Clair Olson in Chaucer Life Records (1966). What they record is the career of a competent civil servant. A member of the king’s household and lifelong retainer of John of Gaunt, Chaucer served as a diplomat, controller of the wool custom, clerk of the ...”