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“... yet misleading. Lavishly illustrated, sometimes with pictures that aren’t actually discussed (by Hopkins, Poe and Oscar Wilde), apparently effortless, occasional, these pieces are freighted with the chronic preoccupations evident since the beginning of this intelligent writer’s long career. They are not the innocent reports they seem to be. Witness ...”

“... strain: ‘He is not an easy man to be yourself with,’ Robert Louis Stevenson confessed to Henry James, ‘there is so much of him, and the veracity and the high athletic intellectual humbug are so intermixed.’ Hardy wrote loyally after Meredith’s death that ‘His words wing on – as live words will,’ but this was not to become the standard ...”

“... has established George Eliot firmly at the heart of the Great Tradition with Jane Austen and Henry James. Today, as her memorial assumes its place between theirs, with the unbeliever Hardy at one side, and the Jesuit Hopkins at the other, let us lay upon it, as Virginia Woolf proposed at the centenary of George Eliot’s ...”

“... fate of becoming an accessory to the life of a more important writer. It is his friend Henry James who keeps Sturgis’s novel distantly in view, at the same time as casting a long shadow over it. James read it in proof, and wrote a characteristic sequence of letters to Sturgis about it, beginning with neat praise and ...”

“... by underestimating some Romantics and championing decisively the high Modernism of such poets as Hopkins, Pound and Eliot. Yet by the time he died he had considerably revised himself. After the ‘Line of Wit’ discussed in Revaluation (1936), a new achievement is said to have entered English letters, going from Blake through Dickens to D.H. Lawrence, and ...”

“... thoroughly sardonic about it at the same time (‘a poetic gift,’ he once said in an essay about Hopkins, ‘is always inordinate in its demands’). His ‘quasi-telegraphese’ style leaves out words which grammar normally requires, such as pronouns and articles, and omits too the fuller information or explanation that you might expect in a more ...”

“... force a rose from the sand. It’s a big, bold blowsy note to open on, and not at all untypical. James Merrill, a poet of some breeding and considerable refinement, once remarked, in his essay ‘On Literary Tradition’, that ‘it’s a bit snotty to nudge the reader too obviously with references to Virgil or Eliot’, but Walcott remains an unashamed ...”

“... médéa, ‘machinations’) of her name. Translators don’t stand a chance. Only Gerard Manley Hopkins, perhaps, could do Apollonius justice and E.V. Rieu doesn’t even try. He shatters the poem and remakes it as a fantastic voyage. Peter Green is more ambitious, preserving more of the sense and the sentence structure, while making some attempt at the ...”

“... Parliament and involved riots and pamphlet wars; eventually, it led to such songs and poems as James Thomson’s ‘Rule, Britannia’ and Robert Burns’s ‘A Parcel of Rogues’. A digital search shows that the words ‘Scots’ and ‘Scotland’ occur nowhere in the London-published 1707 Affairs of State. This tells us something more important about ...”

“... swears to live for ever as God’s enemy. In interviews Coppola and the author of the screenplay, James V. Hart, have insisted on the gripping irony of this situation and on their sense of Dracula as a fallen angel. Great love in its bafflement turns to great hatred; even evil may have its origins in strangled or thwarted generosity. Taken out of context, the ...”

“... form and essence of culture. He is end and beginning, both cedar tree and ‘A per se’. And as James Kinsley suggests, Virgil’s best translators acquire something of his luminous stature: ‘the ancient author becomes culturally effective, and the translator a “noble collateral” with him.’ Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, relied heavily on Douglas’s ...”

“... Upholsterer was produced in 1758, Alzuma in 1773. And while we are on the drama, let us remember James Robinson Planché, born in Piccadilly, London on 27 February 1796, who is part of the Romantic Period and inventor of the Christmas pantomime. The list of his plays runs to over 150 items, and his entry to seven pages. (Shakespeare gets five and a ...”

“... the Commons or the country. There was something contrived about his political style: Robert Rhodes James has observed that his speeches ‘exuded insincerity’. Bracken was occasionally roused to defend the free-enterprise system by attacking ‘doles’ to the unemployed or minimum wages for miners, but even that roused little Tory sympathy. He still seemed ...”

“... tell about it.’ In publishing these stories Bowles joined Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams and James Baldwin as one of the pioneers of gay fiction in America. Williams read ‘The Delicate Prey’ while accompanying Bowles to Tangier on the SS Vulcania in December 1948. ‘It was a stormy crossing, and I stayed in my cabin most of the time,’ Bowles ...”

“... human mind are those poems which result from the marriage of mental suffering and poetic genius. Hopkins and Clare are here, and so are Cowper’s ‘Lines Written upon a Window-Shutter at Weston’ – Me miserable! how could I escape Infinite wrath and infinite despair! Whom Death, Earth, Heaven and Hell consigned to ruin, Whose friend was God, but God ...”