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“... went up. The Utilitarians won the day, The Stones were turned up again to ear-splitting level, and John Donne slunk back with the soon-to-be-bereaved protester to get on with private dying behind closed doors. Logical, of course, but for all that, the lamb tasted raw and rotten to me. It’s possible I take death too seriously. It’s always seemed a ...”

“... at Jealousy’ would ideally encompass both the Metaphysical language of Richard Crashaw or John Donne and the invective of a Cockney. The versions by Elaine Feinstein do not convey the rhymes or Tsvetaeva’s rich verbal texture, but they read very well. With irresistible candour, Feinstein explains in the introduction to A Captive Lion what it ...”

“... act that avoids the twin perils of a meaningless existence and a chance death; and thinkers from John Donne to Schopenhauer have mounted various lines of defence. But in general, as Philippe Ariès argued in The Hour of Our Death, we now generally treat death not as the ultimate test of our courage or convictions, but as the inevitable and unpleasant ...”

“... with them. Some of his stances reflect our parlous era, but others have clear parallels in John Donne, who also imagined how the world would end, as well as in Virgilian homoerotic pastoral, also written in rough times. Chronic, after all, means ‘persistent over time’, and if human self-endangerment has persisted (enough that it now threatens ...”

“... floating in the water. Dragging the corpse to land, he discovered it was Harry Gouge, a servant of John Dandy’s, whose watermill Wood had just left. He fetched Dandy, who came with two other men. Witnesses at the inquest testified that Dandy had often beaten Gouge, who had no water in his lungs, meaning that he hadn’t drowned. Other evidence came from the ...”

“... the one hand, he was a kind of comedian, a learned buffoon, a butt for courtly wits and poets like John Donne and Ben Jonson, who both knew him well. On the other hand, he was the immensely tough and courageous traveller, whose remarkable journeys through Europe and Asia were made almost entirely on foot. This is the boast entailed in his favourite ...”

“... had originally intended to offer the job to Sir Herbert Grierson, recent editor of the poems of John Donne. However, he allowed Lloyd George to persuade him that a post of such eminence ought rather to be a party appointment. Without doubt, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863-1944) fitted that bill. He had worked long and hard for the Liberals in his native ...”

“... church (four services a day, six on Sundays), part tourist attraction, since the 1590s – when John Donne, not yet dean of St Paul’s, recorded that one of the vergers was charging visitors to see the royal tombs. The crucial events were the Reformation, when it lost its monks and lands and found its finances insecure, and Elizabeth I’s subsequent ...”

“... in a little: ‘A hand or eye/By Hilliard drawn is worth an history/By a worse painter made,’ John Donne wrote in 1597. By a ‘history’ he means one of those big, populous, often Italian paintings much in demand among Elizabethan collectors – paintings you stand back from to see the drama of some mythological or biblical episode unfold. No one ...”

“... recalls it in The Fall of Kelvin Walker, subtitled ‘A Fable of the Sixties’). It occurs to John Dyson, Frayn’s downtrodden hero, that ‘failure was the secular equivalent of sin.’ But even his failure now seems like success. He and Bob Bell work out of the same office collating ‘Years Gone By’ or ‘The Country Day by Day’, duelling with ...”

“... Problems arising from arguments about truth and prejudice were to lead to noisy arguments about Donne. I believe firmly that Empson was a great critic, but have to regard as wasteful his advocacy, over many years, of an eccentric view of Donne. To understand that view, here documented in full and supported by ...”

“... La mimica degli antichi (1832)... to the more casual observations of foreign travellers like John Evelyn, who recorded at least one insulting gesture (biting the finger) which the two lexicographers missed. In the second place, Italian judicial archives often note the gestures of insult leading to cases of assault and battery, and (among other ...”

“... a national body of verse. When she does mention Scottish anthologists, editors and publishers – John Bell (The Poets of Great Britain), Robert Anderson (Complete Edition of the Poets of Great Britain) and Thomas Campbell (Specimens of the British Poets) – Bucknell doesn’t comment on the way they promoted through their works’ titles a ...”

“... Murray at his very best. ‘Louvres’ is a marvellous, witty, tropical-Oz poem, as if the mind of John Donne had been reborn and Entirely re-processed by the experience of growing up in some place like Brisbane. ‘The Edgeless’ is something of a puzzle poem, to which the solution may be – I’m not sure – a word that occurs nowhere in the ...”

“... end of my last page and safely preserved my Eastons as they were to me.’ When Dr Johnson charged John Donne with scoring a ne plus ultra in absurdity by likening a man to a pair of compasses, he hadn’t reckoned on Lisa Zeidner, who, in the space of only 15 lines, manages to compare a man’s penis to the soft, hot forehead of a sick child, to ...”