“... is ebullient from youth to age, and cannot cease to sparkle, he yet exhibits, in the person of Matthew, the village schoolmaster, as touched and overgloomed by memories of sorrow.’ He felt obliged – an obligation which was part of the pretention of his epoch – to call such insights ‘evidence of the law of antagonism’. But they are shrewd, for all ...”

“... and conduct in those biographies of Cromwell which have a soft spot for God’s Englishman. Christopher Hill skips lightly over it. John Buchan refers to it as ‘a farmyard jape’ and excuses it on the grounds that ‘this thing touched the heart of his authority and he could permit no weakening.’ Others suggest that the story is probably royalist ...”

“... of elegies for the dead interspersed with similes, and pares away almost all narrative elements. Christopher Logue’s dazzling paraphrases adopt a fragmentary form which appears to have been broken apart by the violence it represents, which is often grotesque (‘His neck was cut clean through/Except for a skein of flesh off which/His head hung down like a ...”

“... in itself it really is”, has been justly said to be the aim of all true criticism whatever,’ Matthew Arnold said in his inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, The Function of Criticism at the Present Time (1857). The remark was more question-begging than he liked to think, and Housman, who knew all Arnold’s poetry by heart, was pointedly ...”

“... in England he fell ill and went to take the waters at Bath. There he met his future father-in-law Christopher Nugent, an Irish Catholic with a French medical degree. The waters helped a little but Burke did not fully recover his health until the latter part of 1753, by which time he had completed his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the ...”

“... of the time. The real disaster came when he entered King’s School, Canterbury (alma mater of Christopher Marlowe, Somerset Maugham, Patrick Leigh-Fermor), from which Brooke ran away in the first week. He was sent back. The second week he ran away again. The second withdrawal marked the termination of his residence there, which had lasted less than a ...”

“... all the eloquent speeches from the dock and those in the House of Commons by Burdett and Alderman Matthew Wood and Byron’s friend John Cam Hobhouse (all MPs elected from constituencies with a wide franchise), the machinations of the government were widely known. Richard Carlile, the editor of the Republican, concluded that ‘the ministers have been playing ...”

“... opportunities for Plautus’ favourite style of ‘buffoonery’. Some later scholars (such as Christopher Stace and Jean-Christian Dumont) have suggested that the slave already played a more important role in New Comedy than Fraenkel realised, partly on the basis of more passages of Menander that were discovered and published after Fraenkel’s ...”

“... the year Aids deaths peaked (‘That summer Thanatos and Eros was an intersection quite as real as Christopher and Hudson’). Under these circumstances frottage, ‘a rather broad category of consensual, nonpenetrative, (usually) hands-free sex wherein both optimally naked bodies press against each other’, was a prudent choice that had its own magic. ‘We ...”

“... felt great regret.Parrots are a recurring feature of early European voyages to the Americas. When Christopher Columbus landed in the Caribbean, he didn’t spot any livestock – ‘neither sheep nor goats nor any other beast’ – but he did see wild parrots and was given some tame ones as a gift. Shortly afterwards, during his first journey along coastal ...”

“... Greville described flattery and other courtly evils as enemies to ‘truth’: so did Henry. Matthew Gwinne, Greville’s old friend who had helped him edit Arcadia, found favour at Henry’s court, and Greville’s commitment to Naval reform and his belief in practical education – a subject on which he can sound like a spokesman for Industry Year ...”

“... jungle,’ Eliot reflected urbanely in a lecture delivered at Harvard. Poets were defined not, as Matthew Arnold might have said, by their high culture but on the contrary by their ability to keep alive a taproot connection with pre-civilised modes of consciousness, so that, as Eliot put it, ‘hyperbolically one might say that the poet is older than other ...”

“... obscure or factitious’. ‘Are you allowed to be as funny as that about a sacred subject?’ Christopher Ricks, his commissioning editor, is said to have asked; and being funny is obviously an important element in the iconoclasm. When Ian Hamilton asked him to reflect on the contemporary poetry scene in 1972 for the Review, Carey duly noted some ...”

“... to do with the sad automatism of the woman and the gimcrack machinery of the record player. Christopher Ricks describes the technique as conveying ‘by sabotage that there was a war on’, and he takes this passage as a prime example: Eliot, he says, is to be seen ‘adopting Oliver Goldsmith’s line … and then undoing it by adding the innocuous ...”

“... beStill the indomitable Irishry.Yeats died on 28 January 1939. Two days earlier, W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood had arrived in New York. When Auden heard of Yeats’s death, he sought to ascertain what time of the day or night he had died. He was planning a poem. What preoccupied him most in 1939 was guilt that his gift for poetry was serving ...”