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“... science. To an alarming degree, theory preempted argument. H.D. had been abandoned by her husband, Richard Aldington, for another woman, during a difficult pregnancy in which mother and child seemed doomed; her love affair with the feminist Bryher was fraught; writing set up its own strains: but Freud already knew, amid this welter of anxieties, what really ...”

“... that his daughter Sara had followed him into hypochondria and drug addiction. As Rosemary Ashton, Richard Holmes and Morton Paley remind us, Coleridge did survive the long years of estrangement, both from Wordsworth and from all he had ceded to Wordsworth; he did begin to return to himself. When the current of critical opinion reversed, he found himself the ...”

“... that frightfully dreary thing in the East End?’ At the end of Carousel at the National Theatre, Richard Eyre escorts her to the door: ‘I’m glad you enjoyed the show.’ ‘I didn’t, I can’t bear the piece.’She was just as rude and inconsiderate in private, late to arrive and even later to leave which meant that nobody else could leave ...”

“... de Monku’ – a bilingual pun. As well as being the Japanese pronunciation of the English word ‘monk’, monku means ‘complaint’. ‘We think it will take a long time to get back to a calm, quiet, ordinary life,’ the flyer said. ‘Why don’t you come and join us – take a break and have a little moan? The monks will listen to your ...”

“... and popularity) for a translation of Homer. This was probably the best deal ever struck by an English poet. The fee for the copyright combined with income from the sale of subscription copies of the Iliad made Pope around £5000. That was an eye-watering sum. The contract for Milton’s Paradise Lost in 1667 paid him two instalments of £5 and may have ...”

“... of the youthful Percy Wyndham Lewis, a writer whose work had appeared in Ford’s magazine, the English Review, and who was about to launch a magazine of his own, the rather more intemperate Blast. Gripping Ford by the elbow, Lewis, who was as usual in incendiary mood, poured scorn on him and his associates. ‘You and Mr Conrad and Mr James and all those ...”

“... word ‘radical’, that heady presence in the 1960s and beyond. Subtitled ‘Radical Ideas in the English Revolution’, his book explored the ‘fascinating flood of radical ideas’ that emerged from the ‘radical underground’. The Levellers were ‘a very radical left wing of the revolutionary party’, he wrote, though since their thinking stayed ...”

“... and Lewis finally met in 1926 and duly formed a club called the Cave for members of the Oxford English School who like them wanted to introduce more Anglo-Saxon and medieval literature, and more philology, to the undergraduate syllabus. (Tolkien argued that the syllabus should stop at 1400. Omission of Shakespeare would be unfortunate, but necessary to ...”

“... If​ his English teacher hadn’t been so snootily discouraging, it’s unlikely that Tony Harrison would have gone on to write as much as he has: by my calculation, 13 plays, 11 films and twenty or more poetry collections and pamphlets, not to mention the essays and addresses assembled in Edith Hall’s edition of his selected prose ...”

“... Baynes (extravagantly described by Maddox as ‘a return to endogamy’, ‘the choice of a deeply English woman, rather than a foreigner, as a love object’); above all, the mass of newly discovered letters in the Cambridge edition, and the unfinished novel Mr Noon, available only since 1984, which gives a quasi-autobiographical account of the early days of ...”

“... this position during the period with which we are concerned.’ Thus, the introduction of Sir Richard Southern’s Making of the Middle Ages. Bartlett quoted it in a perceptive recent tribute to Southern, with the rider that ‘every century has its protagonists,’ but ‘those who see the 11th and 12th centuries as a time of particularly significant ...”

“... trip. No car touring or sightseeing or cool drinks on the terrace. His is also a thoroughly English book, though: good-humoured where Theroux would be sour, blithely confident and optimistic where a Naipaul would be tensely aware of his statelessness. Even the occasional xenophobic aside, as when Dalrymple assesses some ‘piratical-looking ...”

“... Manifesto ‘walks for the first time in the pages of Burke’. Burke’s early opponents, English radicals such as Tom Paine and Mary Shelley’s parents William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, tried to neutralise the damage his imagery did to the popular side, by giving the monstrous child an even more monstrous parent. If the Revolution was going ...”

“... out of Soviet literature since the Twenties. It is pleasingly coincidental that its appearance in English should coincide with the first appearance in the Soviet Union of Nabokov’s works, for it is, both in tone and manner, undeniably Nabokovian. Where Rybakov deals with a group, Bitov probes an individual; where Rybakov employs a wide, panoramic sweep and ...”

“... stories of the Sixties which, when transcribed and analysed, asserted a grammar of Black American English. Some accounts that appropriate the clinical practice of psychoanalysis to narratology suggest that since the 1890s, the story-taker’s purpose in the consulting-room has been to give back to the analysand the story of his or her own life, welded into ...”