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“... of their genius, as the non-combatants Picasso or T.S. Eliot were to do. In a very different way Edward Thomas, who found his true voice in the war but independently of the fighting, would probably have kept it, and been a real presence in post-poetry: yet speculation has an element of post hoc propter hoc. More typical is the way in which each country ...”

“... The poems are functions of a native language, gifts of English as defined, say, by Hardy and Edward Thomas, but when we’re reading them we don’t think of them in that way: we think of them as translucent to what they have perceived and only verbal in the last resort and by the way. Even in ‘The Whole Truth’, where the truth lies bleeding ...”

“... De Profundis where Wilde anticipates that particular form of English sensibility which belongs to Edward Thomas, the Georgian poets and the early Lawrence: We call ourselves a utilitarian age, and we do not know the uses of any single thing. We have forgotten that Water can cleanse, and Fire purify, and that the Earth is mother to us all. As a ...”

“... to family. Being Scottish also meant he could write about the countryside without sounding like Edward Thomas. His landscapes are almost always damp, brown and unkempt. The Bankscape is not the South of England. Ten, and finally, he was immensely likeable. One of the many endearing aspects of Raw Spirit – which amounts to his autobiography – is the ...”

“... for men. In a rare venture into literature (it has escaped her index programme), Ben-Amos cites Thomas Deloney’s hero Jack of Newbery refusing to marry a widow because ‘it is not wisdome for a yongue man that can scantly keep himselfe, to take a wife... for I have heard say that many sorrowes follow marriage, especially where want remaines’: Malthus ...”

“... was at this inn, on the evening of 3 May 1591, that the English alchemist, clairvoyant and con-man Edward Kelley was arrested by officers of Emperor Rudolf II. At the time of his arrest Kelley was an internationally famous figure, but thereafter the story grows confused: he disappears from view into the dungeons of 16th-century Bohemia. News of his death ...”

“... led him to praise one book and damn another. These same merits and limitations are evident in Thomas Mann and his Family, the first of Reich-Ranicki’s books to be translated into English. This collection of articles, lectures and reviews, skilfully translated by Ralph Manheim, offers a searching reassessment of ...”

“... re-appeared. In Ireland, the three ‘internationalist’ poets singled out by Samuel Beckett – Thomas MacGreevey, Denis Devlin and Brian Coffey – all stuttered to a standstill in mid-career: MacGreevey turned away from poetry altogether; Devlin never published another collection after Lough Derg and Other Poems (1946), though his best work was still to ...”

“... we have no reason to believe that the wheel has stopped turning. I quote from a letter written by Thomas Mann to an unidentified questioner in 1932, partly because Mann is a character as little Shelleyan as may be, and he is here employing a language so remote from grandiosity as to sound like a bureaucratic minute: I regard art as a primal phenomenon that ...”

“... and Wilfrid Gibson, and he formed a truly close friendship, probably the closest of his life, with Edward Thomas. Frost and his family sailed for home early in 1915. The outbreak of war had cut short his foray into literary London, but from a crassly opportunistic standpoint it could hardly have been more successful. In two and a half years the unknown ...”

“... fizzing with insects and furious hummingbirds, to hear Walcott speak with such affection about Edward Thomas and John Clare; odd to follow his gaze out to sea and hear him quote Walter de la Mare’s ‘Fare Well’ with its intimations of an English pastoral afterlife. When at the party Glyn Maxwell, or perhaps it was Paul Farley, asked him what it ...”

“... English, in the long tradition of English settledness, whose pantheon includes Samuel Palmer and Edward Thomas, Wordsworth and Clare. It’s not what you’d call wild-minded. It’s a book about books: as much about the literature and reception of wild places as about the places themselves. To create texture and interest and avoid a constant ...”

“... unto his oth. Hit is pyté that he lyvyth!’ This indignant outburst by Sir Lancelot in Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur has long been an embarrassment to admirers of the work and of its author. Ever since G.L. Kittredge, a hundred years ago, identified the author of Morte Darthur with Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold ...”

“... Rosie Johnston, white and privileged; Edward Johnson, black and poor. For several months between 1986-1987 they shared the experience of imprisonment. Rosie Johnston was to emerge from HMP East Sutton Park in June 1987, having been sentenced to nine months for the possession of heroin and for supplying it to her friends at Oxford University (including a Cabinet Minister’s daughter ...”

“... or adventurous wrote it for money. This point is hammered home by Patricia Craddock’s book on Edward Gibbon, the second part of a superb and definitive biography, and by these studies of Edward Gibbon, Thomas Babington Macaulay and John Emerich ...”