“... of Violence at the Roundhouse. His sobering report had Allen Ginsberg and R.D. Laing, Trocchi, Michael X, and other disparate luminaries of the International Times devouring every word. We wanted to hear the worst, the spidery voice of doom: the prophetic voice of the Ancient of Days, Blake’s voice hallucinated in Harlem. We wanted to leaf through the ...”

“... in Biography of Broken Fortunes: Wilky and Bob, Brothers of William, Henry and Alice James (1986); Michael Anesko in ‘Friction with the Market’: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship (1986); Rayburn Moore in Selected Letters of Henry James to Edmund Gosse (1988); and Lyall Powers in Henry James and Edith Wharton: Letters 1900-1915 (1990). There’s ...”

“... and his translation is a remarkable pioneering work, a rich seed which has produced a sacred wood. However, it wasn’t until Dryden’s translation of 1697 that the Aeneid became naturalised as a major English poem. Like Gavin Douglas, Dryden writes out of pride in his nation and his native language, and he aims to create a consolidating, monumental ...”

“... house, and the one about the pond with the water lilies, and the one about the path through the wood, and the one about the underground passages being hollowed out, and hollowed out, and the one about the cemetery, and the one about the word that sticks in your throat, and the one about the lost letter, and the one about the so-called nephews, and the one ...”

“... is exposed to ‘the Irish world of politics’ in the form of Dante’s two brushes representing Michael Davitt and Parnell. If this sentence refers to a child of three or four it sounds more than a little over-charged. But the next sentence has an even more momentous air: ‘As he grows older and the scene shifts to Clongowes ...”

“... are Brigade officers. John Springhall and Brian Fraser have collaborated on the British chapters; Michael Hoare has written the chapters on the movement overseas. The Brigade has shown an admirable willingness – by no means common among voluntary bodies – to give its historians free access to its archives, and to leave them to draw their own ...”

“... isn’t an easy poet. He treats language as if it had the materiality of paper, paint, canvas, wood: in this sense, and no other, I think, he is a ‘painterly’ writer. Marsh also knows that his translations are beyond praise, and that one of his great achievements was to have collapsed the distinction between original verse and verse translation. Marsh ...”

“... the Lady, after a long passage of robust reasoning on behalf of virtue, tells the threatening wood-demon that she will argue with him no longer. For Fish’s Milton the important thing is never to assess the argument proffered but always to identify the party to which the proponent belongs: not to ask, ‘Is it true?’ but ‘Is it on the right ...”

“... Reunion and Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats were at a late stage, and a few days after Michael Roberts had commented to him that ‘Macavity is the feline analogue of the late Professor Moriarty’, Eliot was holidaying at Chipping Campden in Gloucestershire along with Emily Hale’s relatives, and probably Emily herself. There he received a letter ...”

“... with the taste and smoke of sea-coles’. Then and in the 17th century, industry was blamed; wood-smoke from lime-burning and fumes from coal (‘sea-coal’) burned in breweries, bakeries and glass foundries. John Evelyn’s Fumifugium, or, the Inconvenience of the Aer and Smoak of London Dissipated (1661) dismissed the idea that domestic hearths had ...”

“... him on the value of good writing. ‘Sometimes even,’ she begins, adopting the piousness of Michael Parkinson facing Auden, ‘you were disgusted with literature; you used to say, Literature is shit. What exactly did you mean? And from time to time, more recently, you have said to me: after all, it’s stupid to work at expressing oneself; you seemed to ...”

“... a mother (Lena) who has been to America, who might have had a different life there, and a father (Michael) who periodically folds himself into the arms of the monks to dry out. There is the convent where Edna was educated, and the eyebrows of the nun she loved passionately there. There is also the changeable shape of her first husband, whom she met while ...”

“... morning hours. When staying for several days each week with the Mirrlees family at Shamley Wood in Surrey during the Second World War, Eliot negotiated an arrangement that met his needs. Geoffrey Faber, who knew his colleague better than most, immediately grasped the benefit Eliot would derive from his move out of London: ‘An excellent life for him ...”

“... the nominal jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority. Young men distributed dry sticks of olive wood to dip into a barrel of fire. In Arabic and English, white banners proclaimed ‘Jerusalem is also holy for Palestinians’ and ‘History repeats itself: yesterday Nero, today Sharon.’ Torches alight and banners aloft, the marchers sang the anthem of the ...”

“... through anxiety and depression. Most mornings, the car that took him from his home in St John’s Wood to the Observer offices near Fleet Street would divert to Sigmund Freud’s old house in Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, where Freud’s daughter Anna still saw patients. There, Astor would spend a daily analytic hour on the couch attempting to understand his ...”