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“... end of my last page and safely preserved my Eastons as they were to me.’ When Dr Johnson charged John Donne with scoring a ne plus ultra in absurdity by likening a man to a pair of compasses, he hadn’t reckoned on Lisa Zeidner, who, in the space of only 15 lines, manages to compare a man’s penis to the soft, hot forehead of a sick child, to ...”

“... has become everything. This is a man who has written just as convincingly on Don DeLillo as on John Donne, on Kazuo Ishiguro as on Joachim of Flora. But then this is one way of thinking of his special gifts as a critic. Nothing is a ‘field’ for him, there are no fences or trees in the way. The main army can camp anywhere; the avant-garde can camp ...”

“... individual psalms have been put, the detailed Christian exegeses of everyone from St Augustine to John Donne (and only very rarely the Jewish exegeses of Rashi and Avraham ibn Ezra), or even – except where there are specific references – other passages in the Bible. (This is contrary to Jewish tradition, which tends to pile up citations and defer to ...”

“... Why must we exist in perpetual uncertainty (only ended by death) as to whether we are well or ill? John Donne speaks of illness as an invader, which sets up a kingdom and conceals ‘secrets of State, by which it will proceed, and not be bound to declare them’. So profound are the effects of the belief that we are ill that hypochondria must be seen as a ...”

“... take Nuttall’s point to be that our age differs from that of Herbert, or Milton, or Dante, or St John the Evangelist (his chief subjects, in order of appearance), in that the matter would in earlier times have been taken for granted as a simple truth, and would not have required a Borgesian elaboration to bring it out. God the reader, if you like, was taken ...”

“... Wales. The British Government appears to retain a strong ego-investment in the latter two and (as John Major and Douglas Hurd have repeatedly said) would feel ‘diminished’ if they turned away from England. Ulster Unionists are right to stress the importance of such feelings. They register what is really happening – a psychological withdrawal from ...”

“... them. They are rarely loved as much as Shakespeare’s sonnets or the verse of Jonson’s friend John Donne. His plays are a different matter. Among his contemporaries no dramatist other than Shakespeare has overtaken him. The depictions in his comedies of social and economic fantasy, and of their exploitation, have never seemed more pertinent than amid ...”

“... one side, and studies of religion in the English Revolution on the other. Lancelot Andrewes and John Donne are subjects: literature has seen to that. And so is Puritanism: America has seen to that. But not the ordinary mainstream history of the Jacobean Church. We still tend to see that history through Victorian eyes, our understanding of early Stuart ...”

“... poetry and drama – is promised for 1987. Since it will presumably contain Empson’s essays on Donne, which have a peculiar centrality in his work, this final volume will be needed for any considered estimate of a writer much honoured by fellow critics (at any rate in England) even when they found him most exasperating. However, it will hardly match The ...”

“... Milton’s God (1961). Empson explained to his publisher Ian Parsons that along with studies of Donne, Joyce and Fielding his work on Milton was designed to show how ‘the neo-Christian movement has greatly upset the natural and traditional way of reading such authors,’ and to ‘challenge’ this heresy. In the event Milton got a whole book to ...”

“... whom he valued, and who crop up most often in these letters (Shakespeare, Marlowe, Herbert, Donne, Marvell, Fielding, Coleridge, Joyce, Orwell, Dylan Thomas), had in his view found ways to resist religious conformity (religion and politics for Empson are virtually inextricable from each other). They give voice to the personal conflicts of their ...”

“... from his immediate superior in the police force. ‘No man is an island, Dave,’ he says, quoting John Donne slightly out of context. ‘You can’t set yourself against the world and get away with it.’ The plot of the film says this cynical fellow is wrong, but taking up a broader perspective, we could ask where the movies, and many great ...”

“... Susan Sontag wrote, ‘in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.’ John Donne believed that illness is the kingdom, that it steals in and corrupts our lives: ‘The disease hath established a Kingdome, an Empire in mee, and will have certaine Arcana Imperii, secrets of State, by which it will proceed.’ Both perspectives ...”

“... to be aiming to justify the present practice of medically assisted suicide. His heroes are such as Donne and Hume, who both cautiously defended suicide, though both jibbed at publishing. I doubt if he is right to include among them Thomas More: the passage in Utopia where suicide is permitted with a licence from the authorities is, I think, one of More’s ...”

“... art or of accident’? That formulation is C.S. Lewis’s; Ricks goes on to examine a paragraph of John Aubrey who, he says, ‘thrusts upon us a choice between apprehending his prose as genius or as ingenuousness’. It is not a choice I have felt myself forced to make. Aubrey is a remarkable and delightful writer; ‘felicity’ – Ricks’s word – there ...”