“... from Nietzsche in 1902, Yeats had been a fascinated admirer. The Nietzsche he aligned with Blake and Shelley in Ideas of Good and Evil, while acknowledged to be ‘violent’, was clearly on the side of the good angels of art and poetry and against those ‘busy with government’, the ‘men of darkness’. It is still generally believed that Yeats ...”

“... the academic year 1964-65, when he was a young apprentice academic and Lewis was the visiting Charles Eliot Norton Professor: the differences in age and culture and experience somehow worked to kindle the regard and friendship we instantly felt for each other and found in each other. I was beginning to study the American poetic tradition, and it was ...”

“... English poetry’. Hear the voice of the practitioner,’ Ricks enjoins in a provocative play on Blake. The voice of the anthologist – authoritative in tone, appositive in syntax – is heard here first in a stylishly stylised preface, next in a more tangential introduction vertebrated by a miniature anthology of elegant extracts from ‘our ...”

“... held between poems became intrinsic. The renga recently written by Paz, Roubaud, Sanguineti and Charles Tomlinson are thus suggestive. They explore an aspect of our lyric tradition which the tradition has not taught us to notice. Such exercises will eventually make it possible to see that Shakespeare in his Sonnets is, like Basho, both creator and artful ...”

“... were taken between 6.30 and 9 p.m., so major matters often weren’t debated until after midnight. Charles Forbes, MP for Malmesbury, complained in 1825 that ‘bills which concerned India were constantly introduced at a late period of the session and were regularly passed at a late hour of the night’. The Commons sometimes didn’t adjourn until four ...”

“... neighbour Uvedale Price, Sir William Hamilton, Britain’s ambassador at Naples, and the collector Charles Townley. By the mid-l780s Knight moved in the liberal, not to say liberated Whig circles that had Charles James Fox as a hero, and ancient Athens as an inspiration. Knight’s first literary attempt was to describe a ...”

“... William Morris of course, writing in 1891, Kropotkin writing in 1898.Is anyone missing? William Blake is absent, and Ivan Illich, both of whom have said classic words on the horrors of industrialism. Despair and exhortation for a change of heart are weakly represented, in tune with the inclusion of Charles Dickens’s ...”

“... February Revolution and the June Days (1848), the coup d’état of 1851 and the Paris Commune. Charles X appears only as the monarch who made Gros a baron and refused to allow David back from exile. The Siege of Paris in 1870 is merely an aggravation of Edmond Goncourt’s grief at losing his brother. This elimination of historical detail corresponds to ...”

“... a Free Commonwealth, at a time when preparations were already under way to welcome the returning Charles II. There are two elements, Milton asserts, in ‘the whole freedom of man’, one of which he describes as civil and the other as spiritual liberty. To enjoy these twin aspects of our freedom, we must be able to choose and act as we wish; we must never ...”

“... on The Lord of the Rings. ‘His admirers cannot resist comparing him to Dante, Malory, or Blake, with the necessary proviso that Tolkien is incomparable.’ Are they among these admirers? It’s not clear that even Tolkien’s fellow Inklings were that keen. ‘Oh God, not another fucking elf!’ the English lecturer and long-time Inkling Hugo Dyson ...”

“... shudders from the silent pounding of stone ordnance, the mute thunder of that lifesize howitzer by Charles Sergeant Jagger on the Royal Artillery Memorial at Hyde Park Corner. Arranged on obelisks are squadrons of engineless planes that will never achieve flight. Granite battleships hide in alcoves. Ghost armies perch on temporary plinths in a psychosexual ...”

“... are followed by essays on authors once widely read outside the academy – Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Burns, Lamb and Southey – in which Johnston asks what effect Pitt’s alarm had on the development of English literature, particularly on ‘that great body of work we call Romantic. It was not good for it, evidently, but just how bad was it?’ The ...”

“... laws more ancient than the monarchy, and thus capable of being turned against regal arrogance. Charles I could do pretty much as he liked as long as he covered his back by invoking the national interest, a ruse that might strike Britons today as vaguely familiar. But the common law, so the argument ran, had no creator, and could not be challenged by royal ...”

“... draws one of the sacred texts into the field of implicit condemnation. The penultimate line echoes Blake on the ‘harlot’s curse’ (this is not the only Blakean moment in the book), and therefore perhaps fleetingly adduces an alternative tradition of literary ‘song’ and ‘recklessness’, even of ‘prophetic’ political sentiment, as an ultimate ...”

“... generally. Cabantous touches on the excesses of English Restoration libertines like Sir Charles Sedley and on the slightly earlier and more philosophical French examples, notably Théophile de Viau. Atheists were of course blasphemers by definition, and we know from the charges against Christopher Marlowe that, like Théophile, they sometimes larded ...”