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“... 1966-7, but were completely cleared after arduous investigation, a conclusion fully endorsed by Lord Trend’s inquiry in 1974. Successive chapters then deal with Hollis’s life at Oxford and in China until he entered MI 5 in 1938, with his career there until 1950, and with his unexpected promotion to director-general following the Commander Crabb ...”

“... state of affairs? Are there not important differences between the qualitative inequalities of the lord and his serfs and the quantitative inequalities of a professional and a working class? Has not the generalisation of citizenship made a difference? And has not Fred Hirsch – not mentioned a single time in this book on inequality! – made points about the ...”

“... at his (or her) partner or at some unspecified point outside the picture, as in the portrait of Lord Digby and Lord Russell – either way, the missed glances hint at boredom. Maybe the reason so many conversations in the movies take place on the front seats of cars is that it is one of the few situations in which a ...”

“... doubt unusually central to the target zone of fiction that pours Milton into the melting-pot with Blake in a form where the sass and speed of the story keeps the kids happy too. But it’s not just me. His Dark Materials gives you the feel and the fear of living. Pullman’s daemons play a large part in this. For the uninitiated, these are the animal-shaped ...”

“... from Ireland, and it seemed a good idea to knock off a little ‘Horatian Ode’ to welcome the Lord Protector home. Larkin had his own wholly characteristic way of dealing with a royal occasion. In times when nothing stood but worsened, or grew strange, there was one constant good:         she did not change. Coming first upon that in the ...”

“... error. The nearest I came to spotting mistakes was, first, the ascription to Hazlitt rather than Blake of the lines, ‘To defend the Bible in this year 1798 would cost a man his life. The Beast and the Whore rule without control’; and, secondly, the statement that ‘a sovereign Belgium’ came into existence in 1815, although here he is in distinguished ...”

“... Christianity, that they are inseparably ‘part of the law itself’. That was the judgment of a Lord Chief Justice in 1676, since when blasphemy has been an offence in common law; the sanction may be asleep but it is not dead. If tempted to believe that it is, one needs to recall the 1976 prosecution of Gay News and the subsequent failure in the House of ...”

“... Earl of Warwick is shown in orange and silver with his armour and marshal’s baton beside him. Lord George Stuart, on the other hand, assumes the costume of a stage shepherd to play the pastoral lover. One of the finest portraits is that of Teresa, Lady Shirley, painted in Rome in 1622. The daughter of a Christian Circassian chieftain, she had married ...”

“... world ‘to seek my fortune’. ‘How’, was not decided; but I rather leant towards being poor Lord Byron’s PAGE. The ‘steady indignation’ has presumably abated, and the adult woman smiles at the little girl’s transvestite ambitions; elsewhere she, too, can object to ‘a woman of the masculine gender’. But no anxiety about the proper spheres of ...”

“... poem, written quite soon after his arrival in New York, he imagines himself being judged by Dante, Blake, Rimbaud, Dryden, Catullus, Tennyson, Baudelaire, Rilke, Hardy ‘and many others’, and makes confession of his faults: Time and again have slubbered through With slip and slapdash what I do, Adopted what I would disown, The preacher’s loose immodest ...”

“... poet to provocateur. He was haunted by a vision he had had at the age of 22, when, while reading Blake, a voice thundered in his ear: Ah! sunflower, weary of time, Who countest the steps of the sun, Seeking after that sweet golden clime Where the traveller’s journey is done Could he recapture his youthful faith in God and poetry? Was India that ‘sweet ...”

“... most often to a small Poussin depicting the death of Seneca, bought for Maskell by Leo, later Lord Rothenstein, an identifiable fellow-traveller who has ‘the matt sheen of the very rich’. The theme of the picture is obligingly explained in detail to a tedious young woman interviewer. It keeps coming up, not only for its ecstatic potential but because ...”

“... of genuinely new material while arguing for a volcanic adult sexuality in Tennyson who was, like Blake or Ginsberg, a poet for the wild Sixties. A provocative spin was given to the debate by Robert Bernard Martin in his Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart (1980). Martin traced the Tennysonian gloom back to the fear of stigmatising illness. Young Alfred’s formative ...”

“... for centuries characterised its reception. Early British fascination – Ramos makes the case that Blake drew on popular illustrations of Kali for his vision of Lucifer – gave way to moralising repulsion and evangelical enthusiasm. The Victorian Sanskritist Monier Monier-Williams described Tantra as Hinduism’s ‘last and worst stage of medieval ...”

“... One law for the Lion & Ox,’ wrote Blake, ‘is oppression.’ He was describing in his oblique way what Anatole France a century later described more brutally as ‘the majestic even-handedness of the law, which forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread.’ France’s English contemporary Lord Justice Mathew made the point in more genteel terms: ‘In England,’ he said, ‘justice is open to all, like the Ritz ...”