“... it comes to the point at which Jakobson should pass from the grammatical ‘realm’, where he is king, to the semantic realm, where a certain democracy obtains, he fizzles out. He asks us to believe that through the grammar of a poem we have a prime access to the sense, but he never proves it. Jakobson’s poetics follow rather too strictly from his ...”

“... become editor of the union newspaper, the Miner, a post which entailed membership of the court of King Arthur at his Sheffield Camelot. Routledge was spurned in 1983; it was a painful experience, which may have something to do with his feelings about Scargill. To read that his association with the miners’ leader was a ‘voyage of disillusionment’, that ...”

“... in the far west of Brittany. This was a legendary, Arthurian site, where the wicked daughter of King Gradlon once did away with a whole relay-team of dud candidates for her favours. It was visited and written about in the 19th century by Flaubert and by Hugo, and later by Segalen himself, in his first piece of real writing. He was found dead there two days ...”

“... of years. ‘I felt that I couldn’t grow with Chuck,’ she said. As she put it in ‘I Had King’, her epitaph of the marriage of inconvenience: I can’t go back there anymore You know my keys won’t fit the door You know my thoughts don’t fit the man They never can they never can ‘If you make a good marriage, God bless you,’ Mitchell told ...”

“... the burning heat of a bridal suite in use,You’re the breasts of VenusYou’re King Kong’s penis,You’re self-abuse.As he moved through his days, Porter insisted he was more or less always at work writing songs, just not necessarily at the piano. ‘I’ve done lots of work at dinner, sitting between two bores. I can feign listening ...”

“... John Smith was ‘one of them’. Tony Blair is ‘one of them’. And so are Chris Smith and Jack Straw and half the Shadow Cabinet and many more on the backbenches including Frank Field, that one-man think-tank of the Labour Right. ‘They’ are the Christian socialists, architects of New Labour, ready to provide the movement with the ethical foundations which seem sorely missing ...”

“... man’s damnation: Up the Rebels, To Hell with the Pope, And God Save – as you prefer – the King or Ireland However, one of the most important reclamations of recent years is the group of translations, by Thomas Kinsella, of poems assembled by Sean O Tuama, and brought out in a dual-language anthology called An Duanaire 1600-1900: Poems of the ...”

“... subsequently ‘discovered’ and launched as a public performer, she spoke of the time when King James had roamed the country as a gaberlunzie man as if it was just a moment before yesterday. What she sang seemed to her to be fact, or at any rate truth, and her historical sense collapsed chronology. I was moved to remember this by J.F.C. Harrison’s ...”

“... of Sir William Loraine. Brown’s father had been Loraine’s land agent and his elder brother John became the estate surveyor. Brown’s father died when Lancelot was only four, but means had been found to keep him at school until he was 16, possibly with the help of the Loraines, after which he went as an apprentice to the head gardener at Kirkharle. It ...”

“... before telling me I was the latest visitor in a tradition of literary visitors stretching back to John Milton. He said it very kindly, but I wanted to laugh. However, something high in his red cheeks warned me neither to laugh nor to make any reference to Paradise Lost. I simply smiled and composed my wits and followed him over the black and claret tiles to ...”

“... the Vleeshuis, sitting on fine Spanish leather chairs embossed with the figure of their patron, St John, accompanied by his flock of sheep and oxen; in the evenings, they retired to estates built on acres of quiet pasture just outside the city, with names like De Ribbe (the Rib) or De Ijseren Verckens (the Iron Pigs), Dlammeken (the Little Lamb) or ’t ...”

“... repeatedly appealed to God and cited the Old Testament story of the Jews’ fatal desire for a king in its case against monarchy (‘’Tis a form of government which the word of God bears testimony against’). Paine’s resentment of social elites, and his ‘prophetic’ stance in disabusing conventional wisdom, which Rosenfeld attributes to the ...”

“... and the movie I selected, or, as a matter of fact, my daughter Tricia selected it, was Chisum with John Wayne. It was a Western. FDR was known to admire Myrna Loy and Ike to enjoy watching shoot-’em-ups; underdog Harry Truman had been inspired by Frank Capra’s 1948 State of the Union and, as the son of a sometime Hollywood mogul, Kennedy was groomed for ...”

“... autumn of 1938. Behind every teacher in every classroom in every school loomed a portrait of the king and a map of Greater Romania, the perfect circle within which, according to the curriculum and the powers that be, everybody lived happily doing various things in various sorts of traditional dress.In the sitting room at home, the man on the radio who ...”

“... articulate. Biographers don’t forget the history of himself that Dryden was to have given John Aubrey, but that he never gave. Dryden adapted Shakespeare, out of confidence and from a sense of necessity. I have chosen Hamlet as a point of comparison between them – a comparison, after all, provoked by Dryden himself – for a reason best given by ...”