“... have often wished to brutalise the notion that poetry is not for everybody. Here’s Cecil Day Lewis in 1947, trying to get them young: ‘Poetry won’t help you to get ahead in life.’ This is the sort of thing superior persons say, or men who think the main object in life is to make money. Poetry, they imply, is all very well for highbrows and people ...”

“... into the war.Just a few years before, Thompson had been most famous for her marriage to Sinclair Lewis, the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and for what her friends referred to as her ‘comico-terrible gaffe’. In 1931, when the Nazi Party was on the rise in Germany but had yet to secure a majority in parliament, Thompson had ...”

“... to think perhaps you worked in bed, like Marcel Proust,’ a waiting femme fatale says when Philip Marlowe hits his office in The Big Sleep (1939). Marlowe’s response: ‘Who’s he?’ ‘A French writer,’ she says, ‘a connoisseur in degenerates. You wouldn’t know him.’ She couldn’t have said the same to Philo Vance, S.S. Van Dine’s ...”

“... dusted off or taken down. Nor did its unconvincing blank verse impress Raymond Mortimer or even Philip Larkin, who warned Murray his review would not be ‘a rave’. Others simply parodied Betjeman’s more familiar tum-ti-tum verses, which, as the Sunday Express showed, was all too easy: Have you read the latest Betjeman? But, my dear, you simply ...”

“... with the Americas, while the latter range from Francesco Colonna’s The Dream of Poliphilo to Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno stories, taking in works by Michelangelo, Col-eridge, Hogg, Stevenson, Kafka, Jean Rhys and numerous others. It is a short book, but dense. Warner’s highly complex line of argument, winding around so much material, and so ...”

“... you wonder whether Tonks has any grasp at all of what she is trying to satirise. Wyndham Lewis suggested in Tarr that English humour is a ‘means of evading reality’; Tonks puts that to the test with such zealousness that she surely misses the joke.Tonks deploys​ comic exaggeration throughout her writing, generally as a way of skewering the ...”

“... At first the drawings are satirical: pompous men, moustached and bowler-hatted, ‘half Lewis Carroll, half Ionesco’, made absurd by the addition of skipping ropes or propellers for noses. Then the same characters begin to appear in her otherwise abstract, formalist paintings. In Two Bowler-Hatted Gentlemen in an Unexpected Place, the ...”

“... There remains a most decided difference – indeed it grows wider every year – between what Philip Larkin calls ‘being a writer’, or ‘being a poet’, and managing to write something which will delight or amaze people without their having to respond to it in the context of poets and writers. Religion and other activities used to concentrate an audience by figuring in a non-literary context, and Blake or Emily Dickinson used religion, as they used the context of childhood responses, to appeal directly to an audience over the head, as it were, of literature ...”

“... think worth while ‘What’s Become of Wystan?’ was the title of a sharp review by Philip Larkin, which began by imagining a pair of readers, one of the early Auden and one of the later, talking entirely at cross-purposes as ‘one spoke of a tremendously exciting English social poet full of energetic unliterary knockabout and unique lucidity ...”

“... the strategy favoured by the Futurists, Egoists and Vorticists: Pound, Richard Aldington, Wyndham Lewis, Dora Marsden, Hilda Doolittle. Pound ‘took on’ technology: ‘what the analytical geometer does for space and form’ he compared to what ‘the poet does for the states of consciousness’; ‘as the abstract mathematician is to science so is the poet ...”

“... with the poet and that this is a ‘narcissistic and élitist identification (you too can be Sir Philip Sidney)’. Readers who surrender to their ‘misrecognition of themselves in the Poet’ deny themselves as readers: ‘In contrast, literary science will discuss the poem as construction, acknowledging it as labour; and in so doing, it poses the reader ...”

“... Hart, on the right, dancing the tarantella with a friend (1796). In​ the 1770s, Ann Frankland Lewis began producing watercolour paintings of fashionable women’s dress. She continued creating these images for more than thirty years, charting the extraordinary changes that were taking place. They meticulously chronicle the demise of the early 18th-century ...”

“... country, pines for the specious distractions of the big smoke: ‘The whole point,’ the scholar Philip Drew maintained, ‘is that the contrasts drawn by the speaker, with his exaggerated ideas of savoir vivre, are all reversed by the reader.’ But you don’t need independently to know about Browning’s love for a bustling urban scene to realise that ...”

“... he interviews an elderly private eye who may or may not be the original of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, and who recounts an ostensibly real-life gangster episode which brought Chandler and the archetypal Marlowe together. Similarly the investigation of the Ellery Queen biographical tangle leads into a little ‘sealed room’ problem fortified by ...”

“... of Shakespeare prompts a reference to Plato, followed by John Stuart Mill, with George Orwell and Lewis Carroll bringing up the rear. Then come ten sections on the naming of birds, the ninth dealing with those named after people. He mentions my favourite of these, the ground-dwelling forest cisticola with a rufous face, throat and breast called Mrs Moreau’s ...”