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“... Toward the end of their correspondence, which spanned years 1851-79, John Ruskin, who hitherto had addressed Thomas Carlyle more or less in terms of deferential formality (‘Dear Mr Carlyle’), suddenly shifted to ‘Dearest Papa’, signing himself ‘Ever your loving disciple-son’. Whatever the immediate reasons for the change, it simply made explicit Ruskin’s steady conception of his relation to Carlyle, the older man by 24 years ...”

“... of them are plotting murder. Nutshell-Hamlet’s father is a poet and publisher of poets called John Cairncross, living away from the marital home in hopes of a reconciliation with Trudy, though all he achieves is easier access to her bed for his rival. (The surname has a noble ring, though it is made up of two things that can mark a grave.) The house is a ...”

“... how Stephen Dedalus, disowning his own parent, searches for another father. Portrait of John Stanislaus Joyce by Patrick Tuohy (1923) Just as Oscar Wilde began to become himself the year after his father’s death, when he was 21, and John Butler Yeats managed, figuratively, to kill his son by going into exile in ...”

“... a way with titles (which have got better still over the years). During the Seventies MacSweeney took his poems on the run, publishing a fugitive series of pamphlets from Blacksuede Boot Press, but his Odes from Trigram in 1978 were a new and estranging poetry, which called for very adroit reading. Ranter, a sequence from 1985, created another ...”

“... Church of the Latin Rite, not least that section which remained loyal to the bishop of Rome. John O’Malley illustrates the room in his superb new history of the Council of Trent: the nave of the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Trent, a bishopric in the foothills of the Dolomites. In that grand setting, seated on an amphitheatre specially erected for ...”

“... of the Exchequer was inevitable: but the government decision against this project in 1968 took a surprisingly painful toll in disillusioned nuclear physicists. This long-drawn-out conflict not only pushed the science policy machine into a permanently defensive posture against Treasury economisers: it also demolished the notion of a united front for ...”

“... peace with one another, and will not for a different faith or a change of churches shed blood. It took the rest of Europe a century and more to learn that lesson, and Anjou himself, as King Henri III of France, would be stabbed to death by a religious fanatic – as it happens, a Catholic. But it would have been misleading to have left the story in 1573 (let ...”

“... from the other side of a discussion which, in Coleridge on the Imagination, he deliberately took back to first principles. The man who, at the onset of his literary career, had presumed a conflict of Science and Poetry subsequently rewrote the book as Sciences and Poetries, an infiltration of plurals which entirely changes the nature of the ...”

“... too early. A full-of-himself student in Nashville in the 1930s, he was taken up by Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom, and most of his later academic appointments could be traced back to this connection. Not that Jarrell ever felt inclined to gratitude: another of his famous, and most joyous, thrusts as a reviewer was aimed at the vitals of his early Agrarian ...”

“... is imprisoned largely because of love-complications (the same applies to McCarthy’s young John Grady Cole). Tortured, immured, separated from his beloved, Habrokomes is given the relief of a dream: he thought he saw his own father Lykomedes in black clothing travelling across all the lands and seas and arriving finally at his prison where he ...”

“... John Bayley’s new novel is largely about those who are had on, or taken in, and this may well include his readers, who need to keep their wits about them. To begin with, he conjures up a couple of innocents. There was an innocent, too, as hero in his last novel, In Another Country, published in 1955. But Oliver, a young officer with the British army of occupation, was a worrier and a sensitive, risking trouble for the sake of his German girlfriend, and contrasted with his hideously successful rival ...”

“... appears to have pervaded Getty’s personal life. After a paternity suit had had to be settled, he took to requiring women he went to bed with to sign a release just before the event. Each divorce seemed to bring a meaner and more humiliating squabble over money. He tended to ignore the four sons produced by his marriages; when he did notice them, it was ...”

“... of distracting teaching and administrative chores? Again, the Provost of University College London took a lead by circulating to his heads of department a letter instructing that colleagues who had not been helpful in the 1992 exercise might be given more teaching, reassigned to such tasks as fire officer and, in incorrigible cases, have it hinted to them that ...”

“... that mentioned revolt or longing for a lost fatherland (such as Bellini’s Norma): but they took place in 1847-48, just ahead of the 1848 revolutions, not in 1842-43. So far was Verdi in those earlier years from chafing under the ‘Austrian yoke’ that he dedicated the scores of Nabucco and I Lombardi to two Austrian archduchesses in turn, one of them ...”

“... French literature, the 11th-century poem of ‘La Vie de Saint Alexis’ is the story of a man who took his first step on the road to sainthood by deserting his wife on their wedding-night. (In a properly frosty chapter on the Surrealist cult of Sade in the 1930s, Carolyn Dean comes within three italic characters of making the volume’s one joke, when she has ...”