“... It comes as a surprise, then, to learn of Henry’s sociable and venturesome youth. His father, Thomas Gosse, was an unsuccessful miniaturist, who made a shaky living by wandering the country and producing portraits on demand. His outspoken wife, Hannah, formerly a lady’s maid, was the real hub of the family. She was determined to educate her sons ...”

“... next century, the idea of the bard became linked to Homeric epic. By 1735 the Aberdeen philosopher Thomas Blackwell was writing that Homer was a ‘stroling indigent Bard’. Robert Burns liked that idea. In ‘Love and Liberty’ a bard sings alongside prostitutes and tinkers, and pronounces himself ‘Homer like’. Burns’s footnote (Burns enjoyed ...”

“... Yet it worked; it was what got her ‘hooked’. She learned by heart poems by Cowper and Collins and even Burns, whose misunderstood Scots she rapturously mispronounced in her strong Devonshire accent. What she particularly prized was, of all unlikely poems, Gray’s ‘Ode on the Pleasures arising from Vicissitude’. John Patten and his ...”

“... an appendix. Where Forster praises Dickens’s ‘unbroken continuity of kindly impulse’, Wilkie Collins wrote in the margins of his copy: ‘Wretched English claptrap.’ Forster’s discretion ensured that he wouldn’t be the definitive biographer, even if no writer would ever know as much about Dickens as he did. Long out of print, his life is now ...”

“... Oliver Rackham’s Woodlands is Volume 100 of the New Naturalist series, started by Collins after the Second World War with the aim of making ecology accessible to the increasing numbers of people who visited the countryside and had a serious curiosity about what it contained. It included such early classics as R ...”

“... his poetry, if they can be called that, are usually Biblical or literary echoes, like the one from Collins (‘I will ’list for a lancer/Oh who would not sleep with the brave?’) or from ‘1887’ (‘The saviours come not home tonight:/Themselves they could not save’). In his occasional ‘light’ verse the same Biblical punning is more ...”

“... Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries, reviewed in the LRB (Vol. 3, No 21) by Christopher Ricks; and Thomas McFarland’s marvellously over-the-top Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin, which also appeared in 1981. (One might commend, en passant, the Princeton University Press as a place where inventive, wordy studies in Romantic ideas receive elegant ...”

“... tradition as it continued, albeit in diluted form, in the panegyrics of liberty by Akenside, Collins, Thomson and others. He includes Gray’s Elegy because of its compassion for the poor, but one might expect a radical poet to be a bit less dismayed at the fact that Cromwell was born. Paulin is more at home in the Romantic period: a particular interest ...”

“... of realism, Dr FitzGerald, is a statesman who, in the Fine Gael mould effectively cast by Michael Collins and Kevin O’Higgins, seems to share British attitudes to the politics of the possible. His views on the future of Ireland are therefore of particular significance in connection with the new initiative. In the Richard Dimbleby Lecture, under the title ...”

“... J.C. Maxwell, L.C. Knights, D.J. Enright, Roy Strong, John Broadbent, Arthur Humphreys, Philip Collins, Pat Rogers, D.W. Jefferson and John Preston. What is disturbing is that everyone made his reputation elsewhere, often in the format which is properly Leavisian, the short, iconoclastic critical article. The Guide is far less than the sum of its parts, an ...”

“... In the London Review of Books, John Maynard Smith said about scientists: ‘however interested they may be in politics or history or philosophy, their first love is science itself.’ If only I could follow this bent, and tell something of Hamilton as a mathematician. As it happens, he also wrote a good deal of poetry, but his poems lack the magic of his equations, which seem more beautiful and moving now than when they were imagined 150 years ago ...”

“... and so forth. The principal villains seen as promulgating these doctrines are scholars like Harry Collins, Sandra Harding, Bruno Latour, Simon Schaffer and Steven Shapin. Now whether these alleged enemies have anything in common, and whether there is a genuine package of claims about science that count as constructivism or relativism or Post-Modernism are ...”

“... United States Coal and Coke Company established a mining camp named after the company president, Thomas Lynch, just north of the Cumberland Gap in eastern Kentucky, at the foot of Black Mountain, the highest peak in the state. By the start of the Second World War, more than ten thousand people were living in Lynch, and the mines, which employed four ...”

“... no flagrantly unconventional union of the Lewes-Eliot kind. Trollope did not, like Wilkie Collins, steep himself in laudanum and keep two mistresses. He did not, like Bulwer Lytton, lock his wife in a lunatic asylum. He did not die tragically young like the Brontës or poor, like Charles Lever. He did not become Prime Minister of England, like ...”