“... of the up-front money (£7,500 to cover the first 25,000 copies) should be repaid ‘if the said Charles Dickens shall die’ or be otherwise incapacitated ‘during the composition of the said work’. (Presumably nothing had, in fact, to be repaid, since John Forster recorded that 50,000 copies were sold ‘while the author yet lived’.) The clause shows ...”

“... Flecknoe, Absalom and Achitophel). There is panegyric: on Cromwell (Heroic Stanzas), on Charles II (Astraea Redux, To His Sacred Majesty), on the new baby heir to James II (Britannia Rediviva); though never on William and Mary. Theological disputation, first Anglican in complexion (Religio Laici), then Roman Catholic (The Hind and the ...”

“... Hamilton(Sunday Times)Tim Heald(Now)Thomas Hinde(Sunday Telegraph)Bernard Levin(Sunday Times)Blake Morrison(TLS)John Nicholson(Times)Richard Rayner(Time Out)Anthony Thwaite(Observer)MiddlingPaul Ableman(Spectator)Peter Conrad(Harpers & Queen)Alan Hollinghurst(New Statesman)Christopher Wordsworth(Guardian)UnfavourablePaul Ableman(Spectator)Robert ...”

“... exaggerated: ‘Two or three gentlemen entered, one of whom I knew by intuition to be called Dr Charles Brandon and another William Locksley Esq.’ At this probationary stage, we are treated to imperial adventures and aristocratic love affairs in exotic locales, not all of which would win the approval of the post-colonial critic: ‘Tringia lay at my ...”

“... historically new spirit’. This revolutionary spirit is incarnated, he states, in Milton, Blake and Wordsworth, and at this stage in the critical rite Shakespeare begins to materialise as a prophet of the ‘ascendant, revolutionary, Puritan will’. At the very end of Chapter One, Hughes announces: ‘As a prophetic shaman of the Puritan ...”

“... all. And Alan certainly deserved recognition ahead of such other ennobled historians as Lords Blake, Dacre and Briggs. But again, that is to miss the point. In England men who offend against taboos do not get offered knighthoods, let alone peerages. This rule was sufficient to ensure that the greatest Englishman of the 19th century, ...”

“... top. Entering the House of Commons at the age of 21, which was by law the minimum age, although Charles James Fox had earlier been ‘elected’ when 19, Pitt immediately made a profound impression with his maiden speech. Instead of being the usual over-rehearsed address bearing little relation to what had been said by previous speakers, it was delivered ...”

“... the ‘real’ thought of his age: he reduced Coleridge’s concept of Romanticism and Charles Darwin’s concept of evolution alike to sport. What Peacock himself said on Miss McCarthy’s topic is surprisingly like her own point of view – that literature has drifted unnecessarily far from intellectuality. But it cannot be denied that the great ...”

“... of which every thinking man is solicitous’. Priestley’s enemies were equally eloquent. William Blake, whose own spirituality entitled him to dismiss this kind of enlightenment as stupid and blind, reckoned Priestley’s much-advertised knowledge ‘not worth a button’. In Philadelphia, William Cobbett, under the pseudonym Peter Porcupine, launched biting ...”

“... Morgan, his meeting with Seamus Delargy, Director of the Irish Folklore Commission, his work for Charles Parker in sound radio, in the Sixties. In this way, it is a companion volume to Strength of the Hills. He reflects on his craft, by exploring the differences between social anthropology, folklore, history and oral history. The book reproduces a good deal ...”

“... along with Bloch, that all future-oriented thought is inherently utopian, forgetting that if Blake was a visionary, Pol Pot was too. Nor is he quite alert enough to a logical problem with what he sometimes unguardedly calls a ‘total’ historical rupture: by what criteria could we identify the future that followed from such a break as the future of our ...”

“... I am then a poet, am I not? – Ha ha. The radiator, please. Well, what? Alive now – no – Blake would have written prose, But movement following movement crisply flows So much the better, better the much so. As burbleth Mozart. Twelve. The class can go. Until I met you, then; in Upper Hell Convulsed, foaming immortal blood: farewell. After the ...”

“... of a nation.’ But nationality still mattered: Seamus Heaney’s reaction to his inclusion in Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion’s 1982 Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry was ‘My passport’s green.’ Heaney, preoccupied with ‘the government of the tongue’, was drawn into the arguments about cultural identity, language, gender and ...”

“... the puritan tradition. This study by Sheila Kirk and the equally thoughtful photographs by Martin Charles that go with it at last set out the full evidence on which this claim can rest. Webb was 18 and embarking on an obscure apprenticeship in Reading when The Seven Lamps of Architecture came out in 1849. By the time he met Ruskin seven years later, he was a ...”

“... of documentary sources – and yet assessments of his ingenuity have changed considerably. Norman Blake, a recent biographer, remarks bluntly that ‘he was no scholar and his interest in literature was probably superficial … he was a man of the late medieval period, not of the Renaissance.’ This is a little unfair. Caxton’s early interest in print was ...”