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“... sapless, soulless, beginningless, endless, topless, bottomless’. Matthew Arnold and William Morris thought their own engagement with Arthurian and Norse literature far superior to this tedious Teutonic competitor.But rivalry and resistance can also be modes of reception, and the most astute Wagnerians were those who grappled agonistically with ...”

“... invited him to his home in Worcester. There, Fisher saw for the first time the work of the later William Carlos Williams, Basil Bunting, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Louis Zukofsky, Robert Creeley, Charles Olson and others. ‘I’d never seen poetry used as these people were, in their various ways, using it,’ Fisher remembered, ‘nor had I seen it ...”

“... drop-in shows in ways I could never have predicted. The rarely seen Vulcano, a film directed by William Dieterle in a Hollywood version of Italian neo-realism, achieved a lively, sell-out crowd, many of whom were around my own age and some of whom lived on the barren volcanic island invaded by the original film crew. Folk memories of the Roman diva Anna ...”

“... coast of Ireland with a substantial French force. He had fled England a few months before when William and Mary had been declared joint sovereigns – the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’. In April, the House of Commons responded by voting for war with France. Initially, that war, which would continue intermittently for much of the next century, was ...”

“... meeting one of his five marriageable daughters looks forward to some of the best work of the early Thomas Bernhard and must be among the most powerful passages in 20th-century Italian fiction. As the narrative moves through one painful revelation after another towards a truly ugly dénouement, it is not difficult to understand why Gadda put this book aside for ...”

“... of which British poets should be honoured by inclusion in the book. Such behaviour, as William St Clair amply demonstrates in his magnificent, original and compelling study, was characteristic of the London publishers. His book stretches far wider than its title suggests. He has a mass of new and fascinating things to say about the centuries that ...”

“... with dreadful truth, ‘He believes in himself.’ This is probably closer to Poe than to Thomas à Kempis, but it’s a wonderful passage and it allows us to find elsewhere what Chesterton found in Christianity. Truth is stranger than fiction, he says in Heretics, ‘for we have made fiction to suit ourselves’. ...”

“... estate, and her final defiant infatuation at the age of 80 with the strapping second-rate actor William Augustus Conway. Hester’s mother had taught her only child ‘to play a thousand pretty Tricks, & tell a Thousand Pretty Stories and repeat a Thousand pretty verses to divert’ her violent, irascible and elegant father. ‘Rakish men seldom make tender ...”

“... however, that puppies might serve as well as young virgins. A bit later, the English physician Thomas Sydenham recommended Shunamitism to his patients, as did the Dutch medical professor Hermann Boerhaave and the German Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland in the 18th century. James Copeland, an English medical authority who was quoted as late as the 20th century on ...”

“... to the full her talents as a close reader of word and image: one on the novel of ideas from Thomas Mann to J.M. Coetzee and Nicola Barker; the other on the creepily insouciant photographs of Torbjørn Rødland. In both cases, the gimmick’s compromised form seems like the only way to accommodate ‘“ideas” imported from criticism or ...”

“... the penurious and persecuted Górecki was first discovered by a wandering scholar called Adrian Thomas; and fact and fiction can then return together to the industrial grime and sulphurous smoke of Katowice where, in the time of martial law, Górecki was for some while under virtual house arrest, and where he completed in 1981 his marvellous Miserere in ...”

“... re-appeared. In Ireland, the three ‘internationalist’ poets singled out by Samuel Beckett – Thomas MacGreevey, Denis Devlin and Brian Coffey – all stuttered to a standstill in mid-career: MacGreevey turned away from poetry altogether; Devlin never published another collection after Lough Derg and Other Poems (1946), though his best work was still to ...”

“... problems. Parsifal’s sexual-pathological element, which so impressed and disturbed Thomas Mann (an authority on such matters), is one of the Parsifal problems; the issue of whether or not the work is ‘Christian’ is another. Nietzsche isolated these two problems together with a third, which is more peculiarly German: like Hanslick, Nietzsche ...”

“... on the evolution of Pym’s character and Morrill on Pym’s relations with backwoods MPs; Peter Thomas on Court and country cultures) is intelligently deployed, but not always searchingly tested against the events Mr Fletcher describes. And Mr Fletcher is careful to warn us that ‘although this book contains a new narrative it is in no sense an attempt to ...”

“... Prince d’Amour’ for Christmas 1597). This is the set of ‘Cabalistical Verses’ prefaced to Thomas Coryate’s eccentric account of a European tour, Coryats Crudities Hastily gobled up in five Moneths of travell (1611), a book which, mock-patronised by Prince Henry, is introduced by laboriously facetious mock-encomiums from 56 poets, Donne and Jonson ...”