“... in literary judgments of Irish writers; but the phrase Hill uses suggests he is also remembering a passage in the marvellous introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse where Yeats is describing the rebellious poets of his youth who wanted to kick over Victorian moralism: they thought of poetry, he says, as ‘a tradition like religion and liable to ...”

“... on the shutter and it is thrown open, light floods in, there is the sudden roar of the crowd. Charles I steps out onto the scaffold. 30 March. Obituary of Dudley M. in yesterday’s Independent by Harry Thompson, the biographer of Peter Cook, whose side one might therefore expect him to take. Instead Thompson very much takes Dudley’s line on ...”

“... There have been over-confirmed stories, legends left by his peers: the terrifyingly effortless passage through exams and scholarships, the steady ascent of a career curve that would shame a Widmerpool. A Horatio Alger parable that lifted him from a single-parent home in the shadows of Wormwood Scrubs to a Mellon Fellowship at Yale, and the literary ...”

“... life. A feud between sisters? Isn’t that … female? We know about the tragic loss of her son, Charles, at the age of eleven, which means that she exists for us in grief, as a permanent mother. There is nothing so diminishing, to the canonical view, though anyone who has witnessed this sort of loss first-hand knows that it puts you among the Greeks, into ...”

“... readers, or for any readers, of this harshness. Lady Dalkeith was as harsh as any Harlowe. This passage depicts her in her ordinary abrasiveness, going about town: she ‘sallied every morning at the earliest visiting hour, entered the first house she found open, and there, in a voice rivalling the horn, published all the matches intrigues and divorces she ...”

“... flush out the devout, the fluent genuflection before entering the pew the first indicator. Charles Moore sinks to his knees straightaway and prays for a considerable period of time, and Piers Paul Read similarly. Some admiration for this, men who pray in public not uncourageous, though more often met with at Catholic rather than Anglican services. The ...”

“... of English Poets”!’ he wrote to Emily Hale in February 1933, halfway through his year as Charles Eliot Norton professor at Harvard. The lecture included the following considerations (transcribed by his brother Henry):The desire to write a letter, to put down what you don’t want anybody else to see but the person you are writing to, but which yet ...”

“... power. It is easy to see the plausibility of Williams’s account. We need only call to mind a passage from Alan Clark’s diaries. Clark, himself a second generation fringe-Bloomsbury figure, priding himself on his ‘irreverence’, records two occasions on which he broke into tears. The first was when he shot a heron which had been attacking the fish in ...”

“... from Europe than the word pillard is from billard. But the Impressions d’Afrique do mark a passage in the mind, from the familiar to the alien, conditioned by those two near, not-so-random homophones. For Roussel, billiards were real, they went with his smart milieu, they were a game to be escaped from. Black African plunderers were something ...”

“... a range of poets from grand old men (Morgan, Donald Davie) to established talents in mid-career (Charles Tomlinson, Douglas Dunn) to new Best of Young British megastars (W.N. Herbert, Robert Crawford). But the fact relevant to Pound’s current standing is the one in Michael Alexander and James McGonigal’s Introduction: Sons of Ezra could not find a ...”

“... vicious satires against his betters and wound up raving; or the short, fat, gouty corrector Charles de la Motte, described as a ‘pygmy’, a ‘Lilliputian’ and ‘that little figure of papier-mâché’ by the contemporaries who hurled epithets at him with all the zest and accuracy of a literary darts team aiming at a target adorned with the face ...”

“... London was rewarded in 1845 with an Act which allowed Jews to hold any municipal office. After the passage of this law, it was clear that only one further political Everest remained to be conquered. The admission of a professing Jew to Westminster would have occurred sooner or later: that it took place when it did, Dr Alderman writes, was due to a realisation ...”

“... makes ‘conscious’ that which was previously ‘unconscious’. There follows a hallucinating passage on the deep structure of the conscious, its ‘two fundamental traits’, the ‘meaning’ of its different kinds of mutton, the dangers of popularising it without understanding and ‘transposing its principles’. Revel’s own theories are equally ...”

“... yow ledeth to the sorweful were/There as the fish in prysoun is al drye’), but Montgomerie’s passage deserves inclusion in any anthology of dying-fish literature. The intricate and attractive stanza (known to the cognoscenti as the ‘Bankis of Helicon’ stanza) probably added to the poem’s popularity, too. Modern readers are divided about ...”

“... and taking her reputation into his hands. They cite as an example Mme d’Epinay and her friend Charles Duclos, the historian and Academician; and indeed some of the best pages in her Histoire de Madame de Montbrillant describe her troubled relationship with Duclos, a genial bully – diagnosed by Sainte-Beuve as a faux bonhomme – and his efforts to ...”