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“... I read or reread two hundred or so by other writers to provide context. In 1957, the psychoanalyst Charles Rycroft described reading detective stories as ‘in a way the opposite of having psychoanalytic treatment. The motive underlying one is to deny insight and underlying the other is to gain it.’ This might be true of the characters inside the books, but ...”

“... was something of a golden age for the Church of England, before the obtuseness of James’s son Charles nearly ruined it for ever. Published under the auspices of a king who in retrospect appeared a model of Protestant commitment compared with his untrustworthy offspring, the KJB had the potential to become a uniting symbol for English-speaking ...”

“... neglected, in an intense interaction, inspired by the fumey influences of Shelley, Byron and Blake. The charismatic Charles Hoop, orator and visionary, compels men, women and children into his orbit, not always to their benefit. Dame Betty: Her School tells how the widow of an Army captain, left destitute, taught the ...”

“... mind wholly unlike his own. Dru’s interest in the existential spread widely – for instance, to Charles Péguy (‘Need I add that he is an existentialist’) – but it’s impossible to believe he found an existentialist in his friend Powell. Mr Powell ignores the existential themes of Sartre’s novels, sent for review and unfavourably recalled as ‘a ...”

“... voracity that characterised his forays among the rubbish-heaps, and extended Fuseli’s maxim on Blake (‘damned good to steal from’) to cover the whole range of Western art. Consequently, his paintings Constitute an irresistible temptation to the art historian, and Andrew Causey and Keith Bell, in the opulent and informative catalogue that accompanies ...”

“... been published in English in this century (the only point of comparison I can see is the poetry of Charles Olson). There is, however, a compensatory strength, evinced in the full and compelling treatment of Richards’s last book, Beyond. Here Russo takes his finger off the pulse of academic acclamation and responds with quiet conviction to a work which fits ...”

“... Craig Raine recalls that when the former chairman of Faber, Charles Monteith, encountered the suggestion that one of Philip Larkin’s poems was indebted to Théophile Gautier, he was ‘incredulous’. To Monteith, the idea that Larkin might have been influenced by a foreign poet was ‘ludicrous’. ‘He had fallen,’ Raine comments, ‘for the propaganda – Larkin’s bluff, insular, faux-xenophobic self-caricature ...”

“... 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. Their communication seems to short-circuit it. The tactic was understood and developed by the ...”

“... plantation. His mother, Julia, already had several children with Annye Anderson’s father, Charles Dodds, a barber and furniture-maker who had been forced off the acres he owned by a lynch mob, probably in 1909. Anderson mentions a knife fight with a white neighbour, apparently over a woman, though it was standard practice to run Black landowners off ...”

“... such material is incorporated is winning. It is a poem on first name terms with tradition: ‘Will Blake’, ‘Kit Smart’, ‘Bert Brecht’, ‘Alun’ (Lewis), ‘Gerard’ (Hopkins) – and my favourite, ‘old Malc’, the composer Malcolm Arnold. (Did anyone call him that in his own lifetime?) Sometimes you have a clue: ‘Who say “cordiality ...”

“... very hospitable. ‘Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau,/Mock on, mock on: ’tis all in vain!’ Blake cries with all his effortless superiority. I find it slightly weird to see each year how warmly and spontaneously students endorse Blake’s attack on the spiritual blight of materialism and rationalism and experimental ...”

“... authentic tone of enraptured and impotent yearning. Morton Cohen is, however, at pains to rescue Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (‘Lewis Carroll’) from this galère, and to present him as a well-rounded, sociable man, inspired by deep religious convictions, motivated by generosity and altruism towards his large family of brothers and sisters. His ‘...”

“... edition of her Original Stories (for children), with an introduction by E.V. Lucas and five of the Blake plates reproduced. The other modern edition I acquired was called The Love Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, and had a biographical preface by Roger Ingpen. It was a reprint of Mary’s letters to her lover Gilbert Imlay, first published by Godwin among her ...”

“... from Nietzsche in 1902, Yeats had been a fascinated admirer. The Nietzsche he aligned with Blake and Shelley in Ideas of Good and Evil, while acknowledged to be ‘violent’, was clearly on the side of the good angels of art and poetry and against those ‘busy with government’, the ‘men of darkness’. It is still generally believed that Yeats ...”

“... the academic year 1964-65, when he was a young apprentice academic and Lewis was the visiting Charles Eliot Norton Professor: the differences in age and culture and experience somehow worked to kindle the regard and friendship we instantly felt for each other and found in each other. I was beginning to study the American poetic tradition, and it was ...”