“... of a poem. ‘These were strange requests, coming from someone who had made contemporary poets self-conscious about their crudities, afraid to rhyme “bone” with “stone”, or to go umpty-umpty-um. Marianne was doing her best, one saw, to go umpty-umpty-um when she sensed that La Fontaine had gone that way, but it seemed to be almost – I use the ...”

“... that Barrett’s poems were unnecessarily ‘obscure’ – a common complaint about the work of Robert Browning which she also repeatedly echoed. Often EBB penitently acknowledges the fault – ‘my obscure devil’ – just as she often insists on the inevitable cloudiness of those who strive after the sublime. Aeschylus, after all, was ‘the sublimest ...”

“... into focus out of the historical blur) often with great vividness. The three men, Thomas Evans, Robert Wedderburn and George Cannon, were affiliated with ultra-radicalism and Spence before the letter’s death in 1814 – though Cannon, almost a generation younger than the others, was a late arrival. The first part of Dr McCalman’s study looks at the ...”

“... to yourself: I’m me.’ Hujar’s subjects seem to have heeded the same advice: they exhibit a self-possession tending to the monumental. You can see it in his 1981 portrait of the actor Madeline Kahn. Hujar posed her in an empty studio, wrapped in a hulking, dark coat: she looks like a solid black mass from which face, hands and legs emerge. The ...”

“... in Sam Johnson’s verse: ‘the lexicographer’s weighing of the epithet’. And of course the self-educated rector of Winterbourne Came, author of A Philological Grammar and An Anglo-Saxon Delectus, was himself a lexicographer, as his sort of philologist has to be. However, this poem, ‘Moss’, is from Poems Partly of Rural Life in National English ...”

“... but overabundance. Lutyens and Hislop are not the first to notice this. In 1986, the historian Robert Hewison called his fine study of British culture between 1960 and 1975 Too Much. In Mike Leigh’s play Abigail’s Party, the claustrophobic lounge, crammed with 1970s products (like a cruder suburban version of Peter Cook’s showy living-room) is as ...”

“... is able to trace bonds of professional exchange, kinship and allegiance. When Reyner Wolfe printed Robert Recorde’s The Ground of Arts – a bestseller, ‘teachyng the worke and practise of arithmetike, moch necessary for all states of men’ – Wolfe borrowed eight initials, two ornaments and some textura fonts from John Herford. And a small number of ...”

“... the seats at once of lust for gain and taste for luxurious ease which sapped the will to sacrifice self for state, and of the proletarian alienation and socialist militancy that placed the class before the national struggle. They need not have worried. The ability of each of the states concerned to represent its war as one of defence turned the flank of a ...”

“... disintegrated, no longer preparing for government, but for oblivion. Part of the SDP is to go with Robert MacLennan, a year ago unknown in Britain and today unknown throughout the world. The other part, under David Owen, is being re-launched as the political wing of Sainsbury’s. At the Labour Conference there was little rejoicing over the demise of the ...”

“... but rather with the alleged critical assassins: Carl Weber (‘a boorish vulgarian’), Robert Gittings (‘unscrupulous’), Richard Purdy (‘incapable of psychological insight into sexual matters’) and Michael Millgate (‘prim’), the devoted Hardy scholars who have given us studies of the work, an edition of the letters and several ...”

“... documents from the very end of the tsarist period which tells the story of Nicholas’s last days. Robert Massie’s The Romanovs: The Final Chapter tells what happened to the Romanovs after they died. Massie’s book is a movie, big on atmosphere and set pieces, while Steinberg and Khrustalev’s book is a book, as dense with information as an old ...”

“... has been for more than a century, politically impotent and irrelevant. Simon Heffer and the late Robert Rhodes James have thought differently, and rightly so. Recent indignation over the ‘co-option’ of royal events by Tony Blair highlights the uses to which politicians can put the monarchy; it is hard to see why Prime Ministers would continue the ritual ...”

“... there was no need for a socialist tradition to combat the right or to advance the interests of a self-aware proletariat. Instead all shades of opinion across the political spectrum subscribed unselfconsciously to the American Way of Life, which Hartz labelled ‘mass Lockeanism’. Locke, he insisted, ‘dominates American political thought, as no thinker ...”

“... Delmore Schwartz, Truman Capote (on Kerouac: ‘that’s not writing, that’s type-writing’), Robert Brustein and James Dickey (‘Howl is the skin of Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer thrown over the conventional maunderings of one type of American adolescent, who has discovered that machine civilisation has no interest in his having read Blake’). Riding ...”

“... this association. The Enemies of a Bishop (1929), published here for the first time, ends with Robert Bicknell shooting his Spectre, a crime the village policeman greets with typical equanimity: Policeman: Ee’s dead. ’Oo is ’e? Robert: My spectre. I had one. Policeman: That’s unusual. I’ope you’re coming ...”