“... Tamerlane, who put cities to the sword and built pyramids of skulls, was preceded by Sardanapalus, King of Assyria, Byronically bored even as he contemplated the immolation of his harem. Then, perhaps, Herod commanding the slaughter of innocent babies: as De Quincey put it, ‘Herod’s sword swept its nurseries of Innocents.’ Tippoo Sahib, the tigerish ...”

“... and acoustics are extraordinarily nimble, but can even so be seen as tricksy. A late poem by James Merrill, from the collection A Scattering of Salts, receives a brilliant and enjoyable decoding here, as the body shapes in the word ‘body’ are revealed in a poem set out with a head and shoulders and torso, the o ‘like a little kohl-rimmed ...”

“... with glowering skies. ‘You seem to have had very bad luck with your weather, Mr Piper,’ the king is said to have commented when he saw them. It isn’t immediately obvious how in the space of five years an artist could have come to be both a pioneer of international modernism in Britain and a dainty recorder of English country houses. In the mid-1930s ...”

“... of that, and the Express in particular is down on its luck. In the days of Hugh Cudlipp and Cecil King, the Mirror was a wonder to us all – slick, successful and serious about its politics. Its journalists and layout men buzzed round Hugh Gaitskell, seeking to burnish the Labour Party’s shabby image. Now, in 1987, Captain Maxwell does his best when not ...”

“... of The Madness of George III to be printed. Nick Hytner has the good idea of fetching the King back from Kew to Westminster to prove to the MPs that he has recovered from his madness. Of course, it never happened, and had he suggested this departure from the facts at the outset, I’d probably have demurred on grounds of historical accuracy. But the ...”

“... its Columbus. Within a few decades this continent had been exploded, mostly by its anti-Columbus, James Cook, and crumbled into a multitude of islands in a vast ocean, mapped, measured and ready for invasion by beachcombers, traders, whalers, missionaries, colonial administrators and, in their wake, historians. The voyagers, equipped with scientists and ...”

“... of this literature. A sort of boisterous good cheer returns in the world of the medical quacks: James Graham, for example, offered his ‘celestial bed’, a king-sized arena of sexual delight, to voluptuaries (so said his enemies) or to infertile couples (so said he, not a little disingenuously). The steep price of bliss ...”

“... guaranteed his implacable exclusion from it. T.S. Eliot’s celebrated comment on Henry James – ‘a mind so fine that no idea can violate it’ – sounds like a crafty backhanded compliment but in fact represents, from the virulently anti-intellectualist Eliot, the sincerest praise. The un-Christian Lawrence believed devoutly in the Fall: it was ...”

“... As the train trundles out of Glasgow Central, homesickness descends. Gray’s hero speaks for James Kelman and Agnes Owens – the collection’s other contributors – and for all writing north of the border ferociously indifferent to England and its literary culture: ‘I do not love Glasgow much, I sometimes actively hate it but I am at home here. In ...”

“... whom the impact of friendship and common intellectual excitement at Cambridge was enormous. When James Klugman and John Cornford, the Panza and Quixote of Cambridge student Communism, came to his rooms in Trinity to recruit him for the Socialist Society, they found a natural, eager joiner. Dazzled by their friendship, he found his way to the Communist core ...”

“... Artist Waiting in a Country House’, a sophisticated meditative poem to be read alongside James Fenton’s ‘A Vacant Possession’. The title poem of St Kilda’s Parliament two years later set the tone for another politically conscious and responsible collection. The poem ‘returns’ to a photograph taken of the men of St Kilda in 1879, fifty ...”

“... they do feel they know is that their subjects – the industrially injured with callouses like king-size buboes, the salt of the earth and their pneumoconiosis, the proud forklift drivers and the loyal company of chamfering machine operators – are pleased to stand to deferential attention for hours no matter what the weather and are proud to be just ...”

“... number of people hurt by Bellow is probably no more than can be counted on two hands,’ James Wood wrote, ‘yet he has delighted and consoled and altered the lives of thousands of readers.’ Leader quotes this early in the book and goes on to split the moral difference. ‘Though opinions will differ about the morality of this calculation,’ he ...”

“... minor writer with a major style’. Gore Vidal thinks that Updike ‘describes to no purpose’. James Wood complains that Updike fills his characters’ thoughts with showy phrases that don’t suit them or their situations; and that the ‘very pretty ribbons’ of Updike’s style are a kind of kitsch, which expresses a complacent confidence in the ...”