“... to translate Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics. He abandoned a (now lost) dramatic tragedy about William Wallace after two acts, and his best-known poem, ‘Auld Reekie’, was envisaged as a work in more cantos than the magnificent one and a bit that survive. Fergusson’s oeuvre, as we have it today, consists essentially of brilliant, occasional, often ...”

“... of the strengths and failings popularly associated with Victoria’s reign. In that, he resembles Thomas Arnold, a year his junior: the first of Strachey’s ‘eminent Victorians’, he actually died less than five years into the Queen’s reign. But whereas Arnold was a liberal Anglican of passionate faith, Grote’s spiritual home is among the ...”

“... commonplace books to place him in a ‘West Riding enlightenment’ based on the ideas of Thomas Nettleton in Treatise on Virtue and Happiness (1736). The richness of the source material made it possible for Steedman to achieve great depth of characterisation, both of the people and of their environment. Labours Lost, a study of domestic servants, who ...”

“... of a needle trapped in the final groove of a record. Their dark outlook isn’t like that of Thomas Bernhard, whose cynicism is driven by a kind of grim joy, nor do they have the animated interiority of Lynne Tillman or Lydia Davis, whose currents of thought sweep up the reader and carry them along. Eileen and My Year of Rest and Relaxation are exercises ...”

“... The painters have paid too much attention to the ism and not enough to the painting,’ William Carlos Williams wrote in 1928. Something similar could be said about Williams’s own critics: since his death in 1963, attention to his theories and to his life has been getting in the way of his poems. With Williams, more than the usual number of isms and caricatures need to be cleared away ...”

“... Dante Gabriel Rossetti​ could always cheer himself up by belittling William Morris. At the top of a letter to Jane Morris in 1868, he scribbled a crest for ‘The Bard and Petty Tradesman’ in which Morris, plucking a lyre beneath a laurel tree, is back-to-back with his double, who is leaning over his shop counter ...”

“... rather memorably, wandering the hills, ‘each irradiating each’. He also knew John Stuart Mill, Thomas Carlyle and Benjamin Jowett, the master of Balliol, who – Taylor said, again memorably – was ‘nervous and still, deeply learned, a silent reservoir with a gleam’. Taylor’s daughter Una later wrote Guests and Memories: Annals of a Seaside ...”

“... on British Sea Songs, including ‘The Sailor’s Hornpipe’; ‘Rule, Britannia!’ composed by Thomas Arne, with orchestration by Malcolm Sargent; and finally ‘Jerusalem’, set to music by Parry, and later reorchestrated by Elgar. All of these involve active participation by the audience which, as the second half advances, becomes ever more ...”

“... His subject is an underworld within an underworld: certain followers of the proto-socialist Thomas Spence as they pursued their aims from the period of anti-Jacobin governmental action of the late 1790s, through Spa Fields, Peterloo and Cato Street, to the early years of Chartism. These men were not centre-stage in any of these events, nor were they in ...”

“... Company. On his mother Elizabeth’s side he was the great-great-grand-nephew of Sir Thomas More, whose preserved head Elizabeth was (falsely) rumoured to have inherited and kept as a relic. Two years after Donne’s birth, his great-uncle Thomas Heywood was discovered to be a priest, arrested, imprisoned and ...”

“... and Pollard’s Inquiry into the Nature of Certain 19th-Century Pamphlets, the exposé that dished Thomas J. Wise, forger of rare editions. It all seemed to contradict the rants of intellectuals about the barrenness of American culture. Many of the angelheaded hipsters whom I met busied themselves in learning Old Church Slavonic or translating ...”

“... sense, though, Edinburgh did adopt him. His talents took him to the Royal High School, where William Drummond, Henry Mackenzie and Walter Scott had been before him. There Karl became favourite pupil and close friend of Hector MacIver, that incomparable teacher of literature, who recognised his gifts and took him with his other clever boys down the Calton ...”

“... analyses ‘The Journal of the House of Lords for the Long Parliament’. There is nothing on Sir Thomas More. Few of the contributors are former pupils. The five most distinguished are neither pupils nor colleagues nor even Americans. A specially commissioned article by a professor of philosophy, Louis O. Mink, discusses Hexter’s theories of history ...”

“... moved to remember this by J.F.C. Harrison’s ‘coda’ to his fine new book: ‘As writers like Thomas Hardy have noted, there is a certain timelessness about the common people, which means that in the last resort their experience can be expressed by myth as well as by history.’ Yes, and the response of present-day common people to the Royal Family has to ...”

“... to dress up outing Thiel as his own statement of principle. Gawker’s Silicon Valley editor Owen Thomas (who is himself gay) had written:How many out VCs do you know? I think it explains a lot about Thiel: his disdain for convention, his quest to overturn established rules. Like the immigrant Jews who created Hollywood a century ago, a gay investor has no ...”