“... poetry and drama – is promised for 1987. Since it will presumably contain Empson’s essays on Donne, which have a peculiar centrality in his work, this final volume will be needed for any considered estimate of a writer much honoured by fellow critics (at any rate in England) even when they found him most exasperating. However, it will hardly match The ...”

“... Milton’s God (1961). Empson explained to his publisher Ian Parsons that along with studies of Donne, Joyce and Fielding his work on Milton was designed to show how ‘the neo-Christian movement has greatly upset the natural and traditional way of reading such authors,’ and to ‘challenge’ this heresy. In the event Milton got a whole book to ...”

“... a life, even one of a king who believed he sat on God’s throne and wielded his sceptre. John Donne, whom James I appointed as dean of St Paul’s, wrote: ‘A glass is not the less brittle, because a king’s face is represented in it; nor a king the less brittle, because God is represented in ...”

“... whom he valued, and who crop up most often in these letters (Shakespeare, Marlowe, Herbert, Donne, Marvell, Fielding, Coleridge, Joyce, Orwell, Dylan Thomas), had in his view found ways to resist religious conformity (religion and politics for Empson are virtually inextricable from each other). They give voice to the personal conflicts of their ...”

“... from his immediate superior in the police force. ‘No man is an island, Dave,’ he says, quoting John Donne slightly out of context. ‘You can’t set yourself against the world and get away with it.’ The plot of the film says this cynical fellow is wrong, but taking up a broader perspective, we could ask where the movies, and many great ...”

“... Susan Sontag wrote, ‘in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.’ John Donne believed that illness is the kingdom, that it steals in and corrupts our lives: ‘The disease hath established a Kingdome, an Empire in mee, and will have certaine Arcana Imperii, secrets of State, by which it will proceed.’ Both perspectives ...”

“... to be aiming to justify the present practice of medically assisted suicide. His heroes are such as Donne and Hume, who both cautiously defended suicide, though both jibbed at publishing. I doubt if he is right to include among them Thomas More: the passage in Utopia where suicide is permitted with a licence from the authorities is, I think, one of More’s ...”

“... art or of accident’? That formulation is C.S. Lewis’s; Ricks goes on to examine a paragraph of John Aubrey who, he says, ‘thrusts upon us a choice between apprehending his prose as genius or as ingenuousness’. It is not a choice I have felt myself forced to make. Aubrey is a remarkable and delightful writer; ‘felicity’ – Ricks’s word – there ...”

“... other poems, they come from being oneself, in life. Every man is an island, entire of himself, as Donne said.’ But Raine is very much alive to the forensic deployment of great names in support of his own efforts –‘There are similarities and differences between Chris [Reid] and myself as obvious as the similarities and differences between ...”

“... facilely grouped as a cetacean school of Great White Males (Styron, Norman Mailer, James Jones, John Updike, Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal, J.D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, the recently retired Philip Roth), whose ghostly father and bearded Neptune disturbing the liquor cabinet deep into the night was Ernest Hemingway. Even those least influenced by Hemingway’s ...”

“... constantly renewed European hope of an enduring love, sexually sealed, between a man and a woman. John Donne expressed the same hope:      Only our love hath no decay; This, no to morrow hath, nor yesterday. And the same fear: Love is a growing, or full constant light; And his first minute, after noone, is night. Myers affirms the value of ...”

“... It doesn’t take much to make John Humphrys angry. On the basis of his most recent book, Lost for Words: The Mangling and Manipulating of the English Language (Hodder, £7.99), it would seem that there isn’t much that makes him angrier than bad language. Not swearing – he likes swearing – but bad use of language ...”

“... Long ago, with his first collection, In a Green Night (1962), he stated his aims in the poem ‘As John to Patmos’, and again in ‘Islands’: O slave, soldier, worker under red trees sleeping, hear What I swear now, as John did: To praise lovelong, the living and the brown ...”

“... on the 1986 Clark Lectures, Hill considers a number of 17th-century writers, including Dryden, Donne, Henry Wotton, Izaac Walton and Hobbes, together with Ezra Pound. The essays focus with characteristic acuity on nuances of style and tone, but Hill is concerned throughout to detect, in writers’ engagements with words, the traces of their engagement with ...”

“... would lose all flavour. We know about the Victorian neglect of Pope, the 20th-century discovery of Donne, the ups and downs and ups of Tennyson. Perhaps we should cultivate a degree of scepticism as regards literary fashions, rather than confirming or fostering them and adding to the natural impetus of change and innovation; it is continuance that needs ...”