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“... and is also part of a vigorous poetic and critical counter-culture. His work sends critics to Blake or Wordsworth or Coleridge as often as it propels them to the OED in search of what Beckett called ‘semantic succour’; it is as likely to draw us back to the Metaphysical poets, to Hardy or to Herrick as it is to refer us to Heidegger, Bakhtin or ...”

“... by a divine, vibrating light, he appeared to stand like a companion spirit to … William Blake.’ In Craig’s persona, Holroyd is petulant and selfish – ‘He needed to recruit new enthusiasts, but how could he be certain they would not make off with his ideas?’ – and adds Brechtian commentary to his empathetic descriptions of Craig’s state ...”

“... littering the sofa tables of the Manchester bourgeosie. In the 1980s, the American poet David Antin charged that ‘anthologies are to poets as the zoo is to animals.’ More recently, Marjorie Perloff called for undergraduates to swear off Evian, in the hope that tap-water drinkers could afford unabridged books rather than hackneyed ...”

“... of Deterrence, published in 1983 with the same editors. Both were designed, according to Nigel Blake and Kay Pole, to rescue a debate in which issues were being ‘extremely badly handled’ either because, though philosophical in nature, they were not being treated as such, or because, though they were recognised as philosophical, the treatment was ...”

“... or ‘English’: Hogarth himself, Zoffany, Wright of Derby, Stubbs, Gainsborough, Rowlandson and Blake. The second group all shared something of Hogarth’s anti-authoritarian scepticism. Turner acknowledged his allegiance to it when he donated Hogarth’s palette to the Royal Academy, while Constable donated Reynolds’s. This opposition, of the academic ...”

“... wrote, poetry makes nothing happen, then the poetry anthology has no such self-effacing qualms. Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion knew this, as did the predecessor they were tussling with, A. Alvarez’s The New Poetry (which was tussling with its predecessor, Robert Conquest’s New Lines). ‘This anthology,’ they wrote in their preface to the Penguin ...”

“... Archbishop Laud and the University of Oxford is much in Trevor-Roper’s spirit. I greatly enjoyed David S. Katz on the problem, much debated in 17th century England, of what language Adam spoke. After some false starts with Egyptian and ‘the language of Canaan’, Hebrew won the contest: hence the increase in Hebrew studies during the century. Republicans ...”

“... with whom she identifies. The secure sense of national identity came from her father: ‘David was an Adam,’ she wrote of him. ‘Australia was his prolific and innocent garden.’She was forty years away but always on the move, living (to put the places in roughly chronological order), in London, Paris, Spain, Hollywood, New ...”

“... condition’ and simply delighting us with its colour and substance, like an eye-catching dessert. David Sylvester described looking at a painting by Auerbach at the Beaux Arts Gallery in 1956 as like ‘running our fingertips over the contours of a head near us in the dark, reassured by its presence, disturbed by its otherness’.By including the work of so ...”

“... and how he keeps coming back. T.S. Eliot said he was guilty of ‘crimes against taste’. David Lodge made him a twee subject of nostalgic research for the English hero of Small World, Philip Swallow, hopelessly outgunned by the vulgar but irresistible American, Morris Zapp. Lodge had got his significant detail wrong – Swallow should be a scholar of ...”

“... Paris Commune. Charles X appears only as the monarch who made Gros a baron and refused to allow David back from exile. The Siege of Paris in 1870 is merely an aggravation of Edmond Goncourt’s grief at losing his brother. This elimination of historical detail corresponds to the idea that Romanticism, once detached from specific causes – the Terror and ...”

“... him with Archibald Constable, George Smith, John Blackwood, George Routledge, Frederick Macmillan, David Garnett, Ian Parsons, Allen Lane. It was one of the most highly regarded of today’s younger publishers, Peter Straus (now an agent), who commissioned the book. None of these coat-brushers of genius is a household name: most publishers remain ...”

“... a frogmarch, maybe even a toad’s march, to Pseud’s Corner even to bring up the name of William Blake, but historians of English madness, including Porter, help us see the Blakean contradictions: all those élitist mouthings-off about Reason, all that hypochondriacal cool, all those dancing lessons, all culminating, two hundred years later, in nonsense like ...”

“... too knowing or too perky among the native flora and fauna of his examples. Dennis Enright and David Rawlinson pass the test with flying colours, and their observations not only shed light on the topic but add their own quota of good things to the many they have selected. They are well aware of the possible drawbacks, and of the fact that friendship and ...”

“... pseudonymy to combine under one authorial label a team of hacks. Famous examples are the Sexton Blake factory and the Ellery Queen partnership. Pseudonymy, all this is to say, creates freedoms from the cramp of single author, single style, single personality conventions. When one thinks about it abstractly, the surprise is that ‘respectable’ novelists ...”