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“... Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Robert Rauschenberg were making Action Painting famous; and he and John Ashbery, his friend and contemporary, must have felt their poetry belonged in tandem with that school. O’Hara’s ‘Why I am not a painter’ doesn’t tell us why he is not a painter, but shows how the process of making a painting and making a poem can ...”

“... from T.S. Eliot; some Bob Dylan; Samuel Johnson; much dazzle and many jokes; Keats-Byron-Tennyson-Dryden-Shakespeare-Beckett-Hill running giddily into each other; but each writer and observation given its space to illuminate and be illuminated into a radiant energy, which conveys, above all, that literature matters and that it also matters to get everything ...”

“... in a Boat in the same form, will have a mild idea of the task which faced the Cambridge graduate John Smith (a sizar, married with one child) when in 1819 he was hired to decipher the six volumes of Samuel Pepys’s diary on which Magdalene College had sat for over a century. Smith did not know the system of shorthand the diarist had used, but he was a ...”

“... In​ 1619, for a bet, John Taylor – prolific poet, proud Londoner, waterman, prankster, anti-pollution campaigner, barman, literary celebrity, palindrome enthusiast (‘Lewd did I live, & evil I did dwel’) – sailed forty miles down the Thames to Queenborough on the Isle of Sheppey in a boat made from brown paper ...”

“... extend the anthology’s reach beyond what Ricks terms ‘our precious stones from Land’s End to John o’Groats, leave alone the emerald of Ireland’. On the other hand, the editorial policy excludes ‘the British Empire or the British Commonwealth’ through a historical Catch-22. Post-colonial poets are refused entry on the separate-but-equal principle ...”

“... in the seas entrall.After Spenser a little Hakluyt, the obligatory Psalm 107, some Chapman, Donne, Dryden and so to Addison, whose Spectator essay, in the editor’s opinion, raised the sea, with its ‘agreeable horrour’, to the category of Sublime, thus (with a great deal of help from Burke’s On the Sublime and Beautiful) doing much to fix the ...”

“... were a poet of lesser rank. Rochester may or may not have been responsible for the cudgelling of Dryden in 1679: Mr Treglown’s verdict is ‘not proven’. But three years earlier Rochester had suggested to Henry Savile, no doubt playfully, that such punishment might be appropriate. After this edition of the letters it will be hard indeed for ...”

“... still policed its own members and more than a few were called to the bar for going too far. Sir John Coventry, whose story is told in Patterson’s dazzling prelude, might not have had his nose slit open, supposedly with the king’s approval, if he had been disciplined by his peers for casting aspersions on the king’s morals. The privacy of debate was ...”

“... and envenomed by the state and far more dangerous to life and reputation than anything Pope or Dryden had to contend with. All this Barnes brings out with precision and omniscience. His approach is factual, his perception quite unsentimental: but his awareness of the youthful Pasternak’s problems and evolution as a writer of verse, a student musician, a ...”

“... has now disappeared to be replaced by another, this time by the succeeding general editors, John Barnard and Paul Hammond. They claim fidelity to Bateson except where he has come to seem fallible. For instance, he insisted on modernising spelling and punctuation; but why modernise Browning, and why meddle with Marvell’s punctuation, which is important ...”

“... in the opening chorus of The Dog beneath the Skin. These poems belong to a time when Auden was, as John Fuller puts it, ‘unafraid of magnificence’. Many years later, when he had repudiated that sort of magnificence, he discovered that he needed Collett again, and, after a successful search for a copy of The Changing Face of England, wrote ‘In Praise of ...”

“... his subject is less clearly focused. But it is an engrossing one. He sets out, in the footsteps of John Harrison, Harvey Gross, William Chace and others, to explain and explore the connections between Modernist literature, as practised by Pound, Eliot and Yeats, and reactionary politics. Others – Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis – could have been included, but ...”

“... as ‘one of the few intellectual giants of his day’ – ‘that noble wit of Scotland’, as Dryden called him – but he might have told us that his Aretina (1660) was the first novel by a Scotsman (and he mght have mentioned Sir Thomas Urquhart). It is misleading to describe Viscount Dundee as a ‘romantic Jacobite’. He was as committed a Protestant ...”

“... the acknowledgment in the titles of a sequential arrangement – From Donne to Marvell, From Dryden to Johnson – makes nonsense of the claim to rigour. Penguin say they are reissuing the series because it sold and continued to sell, and a quarter of a century ago this was understandable. Then the Guide might have promised to have it both ways – by ...”

“... lyrics and insect poems make a reader long for Donne or Herrick; his Pindaric odes for Cowley or Dryden; his gothic meditation ‘The Dream’ for Il Penseroso or Parnell’s ‘A Night-piece on Death’; his mock diatribe ‘To a Lady who put herself into a bad way, by taking Spirit of Nitre, by Spoonfuls, instead of a few Drops’ for Gay or Lady Mary ...”