“... of Bertrand. The reference to Dante and his encounter with Virgil may appropriately recall T.S. Eliot’s meeting with the ‘familiar compound ghost’ in ‘Little Gidding’; or more recently, and Irishly, we may think of the admonitions received from the ghost of William Carleton in Station Island (l984) by Seamus Heaney, a translator of Dante: you ...”

“... he is unshaven. Heterosexuality! you are inexorably approaching. (How discourage her?)’It wasn’t so much the homoeroticism of ‘For James Dean’ that caused the kerfuffle, but the dignitas of an ‘Adonais’ conferred on a teen idol. (O’Hara even structures it as an apostrophe to the gods.) But surely it is only equal to the dignity conferred on ...”

“... think of Shelley assuming Mont Blanc to be on his side against Castlereagh (or of T.S. Eliot’s remark that no man would join himself to the universe if he had anything better to join himself to). But, after all, materialism has no monopoly on particularity: few have been more fervent in their idealism than Blake (‘Mental Things are alone ...”

“... divided across two jurisdictions.Murphy seeks a job in the hospital because he wants to test his hypothesis that a life cut off from other people is a truly free life. The ironies are obvious, given that the nurses are described as ‘sadists’, doling out physical beatings at night behind locked doors, and the therapies to which the patients are ...”

“... in a review of Victor Hugo’s L’Année terrible, and this must have been one source of T.S. Eliot’s idea of artistic tradition – and modernist technique – as a ‘simultaneous present’. In ‘On the Cliffs’ (1880), Swinburne experimented with blending quotations from Sappho, Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Keats and other unhappy poets of the ...”

“... he described as that of a ‘thoroughgoing classicist reactionary’. He disapproved of T.S. Eliot’s obscurity: ‘the practice of the masters showed,’ he claimed, ‘that the best poems had been written simply and comprehensibly about simple feelings and ideas.’ His first collection, Winter Movement, appeared in 1930 (like Auden’s Poems) and was ...”

“... choice and in its way a momentous one. Had Her Majesty gone for another duff read, an early George Eliot, say, or a late Henry James, novice reader that she was she might have been put off reading for good and there would be no story to tell. Books, she would have thought, were work. As it was, with this one she soon became engrossed and, passing her bedroom ...”