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“... sending gifts from her farms: ‘my Lady Cornwall’ was given eight muscovy duck eggs and Ursula Vaughan received ‘a baskitt of apricocks’. These sociable exchanges were at least as important to the servants who trundled back and forth with the presents as they were to the recipients: tips were a cherished perquisite and all those sixpences added ...”

“... regarded as a pillar of modern British statehood just as significant as the Bill of Rights (which William and Mary had accepted before they replaced James II): the Act of Union of 1707. I seem to recall that in the summer of 1974 we went to the Lake District. Strangely, though, when I left home for university at the end of the decade, the English literature I ...”

“... merely a quarter of a fifth of those so far available, but one would not want the volume longer. William Walton is no prose stylist, not much of an anecdotalist, and his letters reveal remarkably little about him. They are nearly always utilitarian – money, advice, favours to be sought, contracts to be finalised, parts to be corrected, a libretto to be ...”

“... disputes with colleagues like Cecil Sharp (whose ideas about folk-song were later endorsed by Vaughan Williams) were superficially about Grainger’s pioneering use of the phonograph. But Sharp’s hard-nosed rejection of the infernal machine as the only means of accurately transcribing folk-song had less to do with practicalities (Grainger’s ...”

“... Jacks were unfurled in the national press, while recollections of the happy times of Elgar and Vaughan Williams encouraged proposals that after Sir Michael Tippett, the next candidate for composer-laureate and international standard-bearer should be Tavener. As soon as a young or not-so-young composer in the post-Górecki era has been convincingly reified ...”

“... the Psalms – reading Tyndale, Coverdale, Milton, Sidney, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Francis Bacon, Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw and the inspired committee-work of the Authorised Version – one immediately notices that the biblical texts are really quite vile, and that the poets’ ‘personal agendas’ seem almost without exception bizarre, baffling or ...”

“... possessed of – and by – the ‘sexuality of a schoolboy’. The artist Keith Vaughan saw him in late middle age as a ‘dehydrated schoolboy’. ‘It was not in Isherwood’s nature to treat his partners as adults,’ Parker says. ‘A large part of their attraction was that they were considerably younger than he was, and they were ...”

“... Hunt’s The Workaday Woman (1906), to Mary Datchet in Woolf’s Night and Day (1919) and Delia Vaughan in Winifred Holtby’s The Crowded Street (1924), whose function is to embody an unromantic and ‘unfeminine’ independence which the heroine admires but does not in the end want for herself, and about whom Miller has virtually nothing to say. These ...”

“... for authority. Ginsberg often claims to have issued indirectly from Whitman’s and directly from William Carlos Williams’s overcoat: but Williams’s presence of mind in language is quite different from Ginsberg’s, and his poems are far more fully composed. Most of Ginsberg’s poems document his time and collapse into it. They haven’t survived the ...”

“... as Mariani shows, he could inspire extreme affection in people. But too soon they would feel, as William Carlos Williams wrote, ‘uncomfortable’ with his ‘roaring boy, predatory reputation’. It seemed that nothing could contain him, except his poetry. So when the poetry stopped, in a very real sense he had nowhere to go. Like the visionary company ...”

“... day. ‘So have I,’ interrupted the bored instructor. Lucy Gray, alas, was the form that William Wordsworth thought fit to give the Great God Pan. And then he crossed over to the young United States: I mean Pan did. Suddenly he gets a new name. He becomes the Oversoul, the Aliness of everything. To this new Lucifer Gray of a Pan Whitman sings the ...”

“... in Anglican form in the great phase of Christian writing that spanned Donne himself, Herbert and Vaughan, Milton and Marvell; in each of the three centuries that followed, there emerged in England a different religious poetry, orthodox and unorthodox. But the historians’ negations are helpful, and echo another witticism of Donne’s, this time from ‘A ...”

“... transcribes a nostalgic pencilled note from Byron’s former servant and cast-off lover Susan Vaughan, sent with a lock of her hair, and apparently written just before emigration, we glimpse suddenly a whole world of hidden consequences. It is not that MacCarthy’s is a bad book. On the contrary. Not only is it conscientiously researched, it is also ...”

“... of an English folksong tradition, from the founding of the Royal College of Music in 1882 onwards. Vaughan Williams, George Butterworth and Ivor Gurney studied there, and all were to produce song-cycles from A Shropshire Lad, as did John Ireland. The appeal of the poems lay partly in their concision and surface simplicity of rhythm and metre, their lack of ...”

“... it was laid down that a child under seven could not be convicted of felony. Much later, in 1748, William York, aged ten, murdered a child of five and buried her in a dunghill. ‘When he was examined, he showed very little concern, and appeared easy and cheerful . . . The boy was found guilty and sentenced to death; but he was respited from time to time on ...”