“... distract him from his writing apart from endless rounds of socialising and travel. His father was Charles ‘Good-time Charlie’ Merrill, cofounder of Merrill Lynch, who earned his moniker through prodigious accumulation of money and women. James Merrill was at the forefront of American poetry in the 1970s but is seldom read today. Despite this, he is a ...”

“... The person who most encouraged him to ‘meditate upon himself’ was the straight poet Charles Olson. Wieners first encountered Olson at a reading on the night of Hurricane Hazel in 1954. Olson offered him a loan for tuition, room and board at Black Mountain College, and Wieners studied there in 1955 and 1956. After this, he recommended Olson’s ...”

“... altogether: the Hawthornden of William Drummond; the Dublin of James Shirley; the Wales of Morgan Llwyd, Henry Vaughan and Katherine Philips; the Munster of Roger Boyle; the Edinburgh of Sir George Mackenzie and William Cleland; the Derry of William Philips. Its historical scope is just as broad. After a final chapter on Daniel Defoe’s activities in ...”

“... who are a bit more human, and unscripted. Only this can explain the appeal of the shambolic Rhodri Morgan, the provenly disastrous Ken Livingstone and such characters as Ann Widdecombe and Mo Mowlam. By any ordinary standards both these women should have been political disasters: the touchy-feely Mowlam, stealing other people’s drinks, talking obsessively ...”

“... at you now is like/seeing a god or a king/naked and starving in a field,’ the poet Rebecca Morgan Frank wrote in ‘Monk Automaton, c.1560’ (2021), an ode to the machine. But clothed and activated the monk becomes uncanny, even whimsical. When placed on a table it traces the path of a seven-pointed shape. With its head turning left to right, and its ...”

“... This was one of the most resourceful and engaging of Genette’s Cratylists, the poet and linguist Charles Nodier, writing in 1828 about the hopes he had felt as an 18-year-old, fired as he then was no doubt by the propaganda of the French Revolution. For the dream of linguistic unity could hardly not have a politics to go with it. This could as well be a ...”

“... that helped Evans evolve his craft: his discovery through Engels of the work of Lewis Henry Morgan, his meeting with Seamus Delargy, Director of the Irish Folklore Commission, his work for Charles Parker in sound radio, in the Sixties. In this way, it is a companion volume to Strength of the Hills. He reflects on his ...”

“... A further scare followed the disappearance in 1826 of the anti-Masonic campaigner William Morgan. Soon, America had its own Anti-Masonic political party, which held the very first Presidential nominating convention, when, in November 1831, it selected William Wirt of Maryland. Wirt won only one state as a third-party candidate against the victorious ...”

“... such a pitch that ‘I think of writing a book of Flyology illustrated with plates.’ Augustus de Morgan, the ‘witty, intelligent and empathetic’ mathematician who took on the task of tutoring Ada’s equally brilliant but often unruly mind, found that she evinced an intelligence ‘utterly out of the common way for … man, or woman’. Her energy and ...”

“... culture: Burns and MacDiarmid in Scots and English, Sorley MacLean in Gaelic – and Edwin Morgan veering into Loch Ness Monsterese and Mercurian.In this spirit, I edited or co-edited four anthologies during my thirties. All contained work in English, Scots and Gaelic. The two largest – The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945 ...”

“... parsons established a triumphant marker in the field of self-publishing. The roustabout Rev. Charles Churchill could not get a single bookseller-publisher to give him £5 for his verse satire The Rosciad. Publishing it himself, he cleared £1000 in two months, earning as much from it as a humble curate might earn in a lifetime.’ E.S. Turner’s most ...”

“... on religion is overwhelmingly about the parliamentary debates in the 1880s on whether the atheist Charles Bradlaugh should be allowed to sit in Parliament without taking the Christian oath. A chapter on women is mostly about W.T. Stead’s publicity-seeking campaigns on prostitution. A chapter called ‘Ireland’ is limited to the politics of Gladstone and ...”

“... took him from the ranks of the Parliamentary opposition in the 1620S through high office under Charles I to execution on Tower Hill. With the help of archival papers scattered between Sheffield, Dublin and California, the contributors are able to build up a new picture not just of the Earl of Strafford but, through him, of an entire period. At the other ...”

“... is far from being a stranger to mainstream anthologies, while Basil Bunting, Dylan Thomas, Edwin Morgan, R.S. Thomas, Iain Crichton Smith, Thom Gunn, Hugh MacDiarmid and Norman MacCaig are unassailably part of our consciousness of the poetic landscape. Auden and MacNeice, too, though the omission in both books of Stephen Spender suggests that he has slipped ...”

“... his punch-card loom in 1804, which, thirty more years down the road of modernisation, inspired Charles Babbage in his Analytical Engine, the great predecessor of the contemporary computer. For the dying man, the player piano is a lost term between these last two machines, the vanishing mediator between industrial and digital ages: ‘the beginning of ...”