“... Dryden: A Literary Life (1991) asserts that Dryden could most certainly have realised his early hope to ‘make the world some part of amends for many ill plays by an heroic poem’. Hammond goes on: The writing of an heroic poem was thwarted, however, not by any lack of abilities on Dryden’s part, but by his failure to find patronage. What might easily ...”

“... was at its climax. Outside food shops, women had huddled all night on frosty pavements in the hope of a few slices of sausage. In the morning, 11 November was restored as Independence Day, commemorating the moment in 1918 when Piłsudski took over military command from Poland’s foreign occupiers, and that evening a huge patriotic demonstration swept ...”

“... have tried to comfort themselves by putting this down to her novelty value, a quality they hope will pass its expiry date well before the November election, and by dismissing her as another Dan ‘Potatoe’ Quayle or Admiral ‘Who am I? What am I doing here’ Stockdale, two of the last century’s most memorably inept vice-presidential choices. Many ...”

“... began in the matriarchal age, and derives its magic from the moon, not from the sun. No poet can hope to understand the nature of poetry unless he has had a vision of the Naked King crucified to the lopped oak, and watched the dancers, red-eyed from the acrid smoke of the sacrificial fires, stamping out the measure of the dance, their bodies bent uncouthly ...”

“... in touch with anecdotal letters, discussions of craft and influence. When Welch corresponded with Charles Olson, on the East Coast, he told him that he had ‘finally taken to the woods, I hope for ever’. Like Snyder, he kept a gun. There was a bad moment when his companion in solitude, a cat called Stanley, dragged ...”

“... Watching Footballers’ Wives I see among the production credits the name Sue de Beauvoir.I do so hope she’s a relation.1 February, Yorkshire. Last time we visited Kirkby Stephen we were in Mrs H.’s shop when a clock chimed. I’ve never wanted a clock and this one was pretty dull, made in the 1950s probably and very plain. But the chime, a full ...”

“... for birds and nature, and for Loriod, his wife and musical collaborator.Olivier​ Eugène Prosper Charles Messiaen was born on 10 December 1908 in Avignon. His father was a schoolteacher, his mother a poet. He spent his early years in Grenoble before moving with his family to Paris in 1919, when his father, Pierre, was hired to run a lycée in the Marais. The ...”

“... orator in Europe, and see him talk with his fingers,’ Talleyrand may have said: he was with Charles Fox and his deaf son, then at school in Hackney, a spin-off from Edinburgh. In the medium term Leipzig had the greatest influence, for it and the later German establishments became the home of the ‘pure’ oral method. In 1880, at a world congress in ...”

“... to a wide audience. Most publishers’ contracts have a clause about cartoon rights: let’s hope Gellner hasn’t signed his away. We literary critics are wiser. For us, seamless textuality makes the world, from Mallarmé to the News at Ten, indeterminate. Having read Rorty, we know that Freud’s a ‘strong poet’ and that, swerve and dribble as we ...”

“... They had doctors in the family, and crofters; the sort of people, she said, who had followed Charles Edward Stuart to the water’s edge. And she knew all the songs. Margaret told me once of her last days at Muir of Ord. She would go down the glen with her drawing-book and her colours, beyond the fir trees and the water over stones, to the open ...”

“... and outlives the majority of human passions: Dante’s is one of those which one can only just hope to grow up to at the end of life.’ Moreover, Eliot was sceptical about the capacity of style to preserve dead subject-matter. Discussing journalism in his essay ‘Charles Whibley’, he writes: ‘literary style is ...”

“... or dismissed as merely imaginary. The sincere man, the honest consciousness, had a reasonable hope of grasping it at last. But now Trilling finds himself confronted with a literature and a culture in which sincerity and the honest consciousness are only impotent survivals; and he comes to terms with that state of affairs in his last and finest ...”

“... stereotypes himself as the grammar-school boy perverted by his ‘milieu’ (fellow-con Charles Richardson’s Open University-speak), Boyle creates an extraordinarily vivid and well-written portrait of the criminal as a young urchin. It is done without nostalgia, posing or special pleading. The childhood chapters are far and away the best thing in ...”

“... in the physiognomies of the insane – although, as Janet Browne points out in her account of Charles Darwin’s encounter with this approach, it seems that what the psychiatrist could see in the photographs of madmen was simply not visible to the layman.) This separation means that even if we acknowledge the objectivity of a natural history of ...”

“... the strike. Pulling his many strings – among them Routledge’s editor at the Times, the late Charles Douglas-Home – he got commissions for articles about the coalfields which he wrote while engaged on reconnaissance missions. Hart spotted, and helped to sponsor, the rebels and working miners; he organised secret meetings, held MacGregor’s hand when ...”