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“... in this drama: the Imagists – H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Richard Aldington, T.E. Hulme, F.S. Flint, John Gould Fletcher, Amy Lowell – as well as scores more who had a stake in the continuing vitality of literature, including Yeats, Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. The writers, clustered in clubs or ‘gangs’, wanted to ...”

“... travel for ‘ladies’). This absence is exacerbated in the recent reprints, which have retained John Craxton’s characteristic cover designs, but omitted the arresting black and white photographs taken by Joan that were included in the first editions. Despite all this, Mani and Roumeli remain extraordinarily engaging books. This is partly thanks to Leigh ...”

“... 1581, and then a number of letters – business letters, essentially – to his half-brother Sir John Gilbert about privateering, shipping and local matters. There is nothing about the Virginia (Roanoke) Plantation, his rise at Court in the 1580s, or his intellectual activities. Only in his correspondence with Sir Robert Cecil in the 1590s do the letters ...”

“... be the later leaders of the Long Parliament, the Earl of Warwick, Lord Saye and Sale and Lord Brooke: their plans for naval war against Spain in the Caribbean in 1641 and their schemes for the wholesale colonisation of Ireland in 1642, in conjunction with the City traders to the Americas, are not mentioned. Here, indeed, is a political alliance of the ...”

“... Edward Marsh stubbornly published best-selling poetry collections, featuring Walter de la Mare, John Drinkwater, Harold Monro, Rupert Brooke, Wilfrid Blunt, nervously commemorating a threatened pastoral. Other writers, more diffident or isolated, threw in their lot with entropy: Charlotte Mew’s poetry of the early ...”

“... starts her life’s journey to self-extinction and the unvisited grave. J. Hillis Ladislaw (né Brooke) would have ended up teaching at some godforsaken community college in the middle of nowhere. Or perhaps he would have become a Mr Chips, beloved by generations of school children. He would not have become President of the MLA and (arguably) the most ...”

“... fun and games, in a new world where to be young was very heaven, suffuses Rupert Brooke’s life and letters, sometimes rather sickeningly so; and it produces a lot of sticky passages in E.M. Forster’s novels A Room With a View and The Longest Journey. Forster, too, was a great admirer of The Way of All Flesh, about which there was nothing ...”

“... Löns, Peter Baum or Walter Flex? But they are, or were, as notorious in their homeland as Rupert Brooke in our own; and when Tim Cross introduces us to their lives and works – the latter usually having the pathos of schoolboy essays or prize poems – they become as alive as Sorley, Ledwidge, and their other English opposite numbers admirably presented by ...”

“... a number of illustrious admirers – including those poetic polar opposites, Geoffrey Hill and John Ashbery – his poetry is still not widely known. ‘Soldiers Bathing’, it’s true, is likely to feature in any anthology or critical account of the poetry of the Second World War, and assiduous scholars of both Hill and Ashbery have explored Prince’s ...”

“... a sense of what poems are really up to, as distinct from what critics have tried to make them. John Hollander, himself a fine poet, is such a generalist; and Melodious Guile, to my mind the best of his critical books, takes its place – along with Donald Davie’s Articulate Energy and Winifred Nowottny’s The Language Poets Use – among the very few ...”

“... Pavements considerably, all the while enjoying a well-rounded private life: after an affair with John Gilbert, she took up with young buck Gary Cooper ... You can feel Nemesis coming on with every drop of a name. Sure enough: Her bedroom was chock-a-block with gardenias and tuberoses; it glowed with the flicker of several dozen candles. In this shrine to ...”

“... themselves in such huge numbers that the Army simply couldn’t cope. Many of them had read Brooke’s famous sonnets and saw themselves as swimmers into cleanness leaping. Sassoon was one of hundreds of thousands who entered the war ardent for some desperate glory. By the latter half of 1916, however, his attitude had changed, as had that of the vast ...”

“... John Murray’s fiction has always seemed to arise directly from the circumstances of his own life. At first, his work concentrated on his childhood and adolescence among the tiny, depressed communities that straggle along the English side of the Solway Firth. He then broke with his working-class background and read Sanskrit and Avestan at Oxford, later studying classical Indian medicine ...”

“... Fulke Greville, whose life of Sidney is the more substantial of the two treatises edited by John Gouws as The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke – the other being A Letter to an Honourable Lady, where the lifelong bachelor Greville offered a mistreated wife (now unidentifiable, and perhaps imaginary) the ...”

“... Cheered on by the Tory faithful, John Major recently dismissed as ‘claptrap’ a letter signed by 500 university teachers of English attacking the proposed revisions to the National Curriculum. The academics were accused – falsely, I believe – of wanting to undermine the teaching of Shakespeare. A few months earlier, the Education Secretary John Patten sent back an official report on English in schools with the comment that 15-year-olds perhaps ought to be made to study the ‘great tradition of the novel ...”