“... will all be going to hell. That’ll answer them. Herbert has influenced poets from Henry Vaughan and Richard Crashaw to Dylan Thomas and Geoffrey Hill. And not only poets; reading Herbert has made converts, even in modern times. While reciting ‘Love (III)’, the famous last poem in The Temple, Simone Weil ...”

“... tea-cup opensA lane to the land of the dead.These vistas owe something to Auden’s first love, Thomas Hardy, and especially to what he described as Hardy’s way of ‘looking at life from a very great height’, his willingness ‘to see the individual life related not only to the local social life of its time, but to the whole of human history, life on ...”

“... of the prisoners needed to go to the native hospital. As Keyen’s condition worsened, the DC, Henry Izard, was ‘pulled out of the Club’ to record his dying deposition; the Selwyns were also present.Helen Selwyn’s trial would focus on a matter of fact and a matter of judgment. Why did Keyen die on 25 June, from what causes, immediate and remote? And ...”

“... is one of Scott Berg’s occasional plunges into the jacuzzi of archaism, so let us say of Thomas Schatz’s book that it is encomiastic about the studio system to which Goldwyn was such an eccentric exception, since he used his own money and made only two or three pictures a year. It judges the system to have been at its apogee in the Thirties and ...”

“... seemed to imagine that common sense was socialism. As if all that were not enough, he thought Henry Miller was an outstanding novelist. As judicious (though not hopelessly balanced) accounts, the new biographies by Gordon Bowker and D.J. Taylor confirm what the law of averages might have led one to suspect: some of this is true, some of it questionable ...”

“... however, Garrow is an object of contempt. He rates over ten times as many index entries as Thomas Erskine, a more important figure, because he is the exemplar for a thesis which rings through the book like the 13th chime of the clock – that where the old form of English trial was a truth-seeking process, albeit an inefficient one, the modern ...”

“... of the American canon can be traced back to Bloom’s Emersonian preoccupations. So the chapter on Henry James argues that Isabel Archer in Portrait of a Lady is ‘one of Emerson’s children’, who illustrates a drive for self-reliance at any cost. I’m not convinced that this claim gets any purchase on the dark intricacies of James’s Americoeuropean ...”

“... in 1939 in the avant-garde Paris literary journal Volontés, which also published Raymond Queneau, Henry Miller, Octavio Paz and Pablo Neruda.Return to My Native Land is often situated in the French literary tradition, and discussed in relation to Césaire’s major stylistic influences – Lautréamont, Claudel, Rimbaud, Apollinaire. But the poem is also part ...”

“... Stephen de Silva, a cathedral guide, told the Friends that the lines cut into the face of St Thomas Becket, defier of the authority of the English king in the name of the rights of the pan-European Church, had been cut especially deep. ‘They seem to have been made with some venom,’ he said. ‘Henry VIII had a ...”

“... that this was code for something else. The letter Bloom received – he was using the pseudonym Henry Flower – from a woman called Martha Clifford in the Lotus-Eaters episode was suggestive: ‘I have never felt so much drawn to a man as you. I feel so bad about. Please write me a long letter and tell me more. Remember if you do not I will punish you. So ...”

“... The pool has been comprehensively scooped. Forster got first dibs on the blacking factory episode. Thomas Wright broke the Ellen Ternan scandal. Edgar Johnson had first go at the Burdett-Coutts material. And the editors of the Pilgrim Edition of the letters have forbidden Ackroyd from quoting anything other than ‘occasional and brief phrases from Dickens’s ...”

“... later than Wilson, a black sailor from Boston, was being admired there as a sort of Greek god. Sir Thomas Lawrence found in him the combined perfections of the finest Classical statues, and Benjamin Robert Haydon wrote as enthusiastically about him as he did about the Parthenon Marbles. Having taken separate moulds of all parts of Wilson’s body, Haydon ...”

“... his life to his work, as happens in Lowell or Berryman. Essentially Schwartz was, like Dylan Thomas, a dazzling phrasemaker. His first lines were usually his best, and these often became the poems’ titles: ‘Dogs are Shakespearean, Children are strangers’, ‘In the Naked Bed, in Plato’s Cave’, ‘The Beautiful American Word, Sure’. Phrases ...”

“... the history of the Left – by studying the history of theory are in danger of anachronism. As Henry Drucker pointed out in The Doctrine and Ethos of the Labour Party, a gulf always existed between the thinkers quoted in set-pieces – Marx, Tawney, Orwell and the rest – and the trade-union argot of the smoke-filled rooms, where decisions were ...”

“... unleashed the Turkish invasion, which in two instalments defeated the not very robust efforts of Henry Kissinger and James Callaghan to call a halt, and which had the effect of precipitating that vast shift in populations that was the requisite preliminary to the achievement of the Turkish Cypriot programme of 1964. The Cyprus crisis of 1974 was not a very ...”