“... On​ 10 January 1616, Sir Thomas Roe was received by Emperor Jahangir at his court in Ajmer in Northern India. Jahangir sat in an overhead gallery, with guests standing in hierarchically ranked tiers, and Roe remarked how ‘this sitting out hath so much affinity with a theatre … the king in his gallery; the great men lifted on a stage as actors; the vulgar below gazing on ...”

“... If Britons wished to avert ‘the heavy national judgment which is hanging over us’, Thomas Clarkson said in a sermon in 1787, they would have to ‘remove the stain of the blood of Africa’. For Wilberforce, ‘establishing a trade on true commercial principles’ would be a way of making ‘reparations to Africa’. This was as far as they ...”

“... printed in 1896 at William Morris’s Kelmscott Press (‘a pocket cathedral’, according to Edward Burne-Jones); or Mr William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (1623), the book we call the First Folio but shouldn’t (because it wasn’t). These are big books, both physically and in their impact, but they are also vastly ...”

“... is a close similarity between Wordsworth’s manifesto in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, and Edward Marsh introducing the first Georgian anthology in 1912 with the statement that ‘English poetry is once again putting on a new strength and beauty.’ The difference is that Wordsworth really was heralding a new era of sensibility, as Ezra Pound was to do ...”

“... writer’s style without losing the grain. A few weeks ago, we were discussing the poetry of Dylan Thomas. ‘Which of the poems do you like?’ he asked.‘The one about the fields.’‘“Do Not Go Gently Into Those Good Fields”?’‘Very funny.’‘Which one, then?’‘The one about the farm.’‘“Fern Hill,”’ he said. ‘Will you read it to ...”

“... writers: a verse recipe in the manner of William King, 21 ‘Vignettes’ based on engravings by Thomas Bewick, and some distinctly Wordsworthian landscape poems feature in his collection. But where Clampitt hops about dottily – despite the decorous appearance of her stanzas – snatching at bits of Keats and Hopkins, Lindop writes out of a deep engagement ...”

“... a dubious decorum. What was their relationship like? In a telling family memoir from 1867, James Edward Austen-Leigh, Austen’s nephew, described it thus: Their sisterly affection for each other could scarcely be exceeded. Perhaps it began on Jane’s side with a feeling of deference natural to a loving child towards a kind elder sister. Something of this ...”

“... Edward Said’s Orientalism, published in 1978, gave intellectuals and writers from once colonised nations (themselves often migrants, like Said) a language that liberated and shackled in almost equal measure. Said’s critical perspective gave both Europeans and non-Europeans a shrewder and more unillusioned sense of the subterranean ways in which power operated through the cultures of empire, and is now so familiar that it’s easily taken for granted ...”

“... in its everyday susceptibility to invasion by outside forces. Cowper, like Mansfield Park after Edward Said’s reading and Patricia Rozema’s movie, will never be the same again, and we will wonder why we never saw him this way before. Some of the best parts of Favret’s book are about the pervasive metaphorisation of military violence in the vocabulary ...”

“... of the earliest literature in French was written in England, including some of the most famous: Thomas of Britain’s Tristan, and, very possibly, the lais of Marie de France. More was written under the broad aegis of the Angevin courts, of Henry II and the various powerful women connected with him (his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine, her daughter Marie de ...”

“... Moore who sang his praises, but other, very different kinds of poet too: Robert Graves, Dylan Thomas, Octavio Paz, Louis Zukofsky and Charles Olson. As did any number of critics: Edmund Wilson, Harry Levin, Jacques Barzun, Lionel Trilling, Guy Davenport. Were all of them hornswoggled, taken in by the surface polish and acrobatics of Cummings’s style ...”

“... across the UK were predominantly a result of rural-urban divides.Townshend refers to the work of Thomas Macknight, a journalist often credited with pioneering the ‘two nations theory’ – in which Ulster Protestants form their own distinct nation on the island of Ireland. He doesn’t mention W.F. Moneypenny’s The Two Irish Nations: An Essay on Home ...”

“... and inflammation of the infected arm. But they didn’t contract smallpox.Two decades later, Edward Jenner, a doctor and fellow of the Royal Society, went a step further. He infected a young boy with cowpox and then, two months later, with smallpox (a questionable approach, but Jenner had himself been inoculated as a child). The boy had a fever from the ...”

“... the previous generation, and demanding to be amused: at any rate, the first of the great amusers, Edward Lear, appeared on the scene in 1846, with his exhilarating nonsense (‘There was an Old Man in a tree, who was horribly bored by a Bee’) and matching lithographs. From this point on, there was no holding children’s books or their ...”

“... some engaging pictures of potentates, not all trustworthy-looking. But do we need a portrait of Edward VII just because he sat on the platform at a Curzon lecture? The Ladies of Castlebrae is a saga of learned frumps triumphant. It describes how wealthy twin sisters from Ayrshire, blue-stockings who in fact wore white stockings, travelled to St ...”