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“... fantasist Fuseli were at the height of their powers, and that embarrassing outsider William Blake was issuing book after book of illuminated prophecy. Farington himself was not a major participant in this rich flowering: his meticulous, straight-laced art belongs more to an earlier age. But he was a great observer. Although the diary has been known to ...”

“... up far beyond the sphere of our affections – one of the very deepest sayings I have met with in Lord Bacon seems to me to be ‘There is no excellent beauty without some strangeness in the proportion.’ The strangeness of Palmer’s Shoreham pictures depended on more than freedom from the need to sell. The trajectory of his career stutters and veers like ...”

“... highly readable because animated by all of Grigson’s brilliant erudition and spirit of advocacy. Lord David Cecil’s long chapter in his 1969 book Visionary and Dreamer: Two Poetic Painters (the other one is Burne-Jones) is a more languid affair, but it usefully brought Cecil’s own Romantic instincts to bear on a painter whose inspiration was often ...”

“... from The Waste Land, from Chaucer to Spenser and Shakespeare and Donne, through Milton and Blake and Keats, to David Jones, Gascoyne, Dylan Thomas, Nicholas Moore, to Lee Harwood’s Cable Street, Bill Griffiths’s Whitechapel and Brian Catling’s The Stumbling Block. London infected its interpreters, soliciting contributions to an open-ended ...”

“... the same reason, that what the poet has said may be taken in many different ways by his readers. Blake would have agreed with Shelley’s note about God at the end of ‘Queen Mab’, that ‘the works of His fingers have borne witness against Him.’ In whatever spirit of humility a great poet undertakes to demonstrate a transcendental view of our ...”

“... glad to say. I cannot decide which was the more influential and which was the more neglected – Lord Shelburne or Lord Holland. They make an appropriate pair, both having been educated at Christ’s College. The last two essays make a surprising appearance in a volume which I had mistakenly supposed to be in honour of a ...”

“... there occurs in it a passing reference to ‘the raw material for half-finished books on William Blake and Customs in Common’, works long since published. From the mid-Eighties mountainous illness surrounded Edward, from which he nonetheless retrieved the last big works: Customs in Common (1991), which traced a disappearing culture back over ground where ...”

“... am being unfair, for many of the essays in the volume – on the development of Parliament (Robert Blake), ‘War and Peace with Wales, Scotland and Ireland’ (Hugh Trevor-Roper), art and popular taste (Quentin Bell), the evolution of the English landscape (Richard Muir) – are excellent and briskly-written popularising surveys. But the whole enterprise, I ...”

“... the Gipes with a Thin dog the Spake a forn Langige on a bus Top Told the pasegers Stand prase the LORD but the wod not: Hop it sun shine No more i need a new pensel difrit culer * the river Stech of fith a man fell in pisend you her the Ships woo in the fog Monings the say a Gost of Billie Okins Lost at Sea pa prech the Sea men and perrosterturts when a ...”

“... or so articles, incorporating most of the best of his critical work, he re-reads poems by Keats, Blake, Coleridge, Christina Rossetti and other 19th-century writers, as both a critical interpreter and a cultural historian who pays unusually close attention to format and circumstance. Working in the American academy, McGann responds to its changing ...”

“... of restlessness, the poet has now acquired: he spreads his ‘booted legs’ and feels like a lord. Even the daily round of country life seems benevolent: a dead hornet, frail and pathetic, ‘its warrior’s head bent sideways’, strengthens the poet’s resolve that his own death will be, not like that, but full of ‘grace and honour’; the decent ...”

“... of child labour in London, the return to his mother in Brighton. His autobiography, It’s Me, O Lord!, fills them out in greater detail, but also offers a caveat: no ‘fiction-monger’ writing a memoir can be trusted, he says, since he will ‘helplessly, perhaps even thoughtlessly, but more probably designedly, select, omit, minimise, exaggerate, in fact ...”

“... raised in Lambeth – Lambeth, ‘the Bride, the Lamb’s Wife’, according to William Blake – nevertheless, I was scared shitless the first time I went to the East End. Patrick White says somewhere that there is an intangible difference in the air of places where there has been intense suffering, that you can never get rid of the memory that ...”

“... it could hardly be mistaken for a creature of the same name defended long ago by William Blake. Dame Helen herself seems often to speak on behalf of some public body. And sure enough she speaks up for Lord Robbins and her other colleagues, for the most part robustly impenitent though prepared to concede ‘a ...”

“... knowledge of, and evident affection for, Sayers’s fiction – the detective stories about Lord Peter Wimsey especially. And now, she comes forward with what will surely rank as the definitive biography of Sayers. It is not a book which contains any surprises for those of us who have read the previous biographies. Indeed, Dr Reynolds gives us rather ...”