“... for it. Yet she fills a necessary space in a mind that is ravenous for conviction. It is as if Hopkins had fallen in love at the moment of ‘the terrible sonnets’, and his poems, instead of being ‘cries like dead letters sent/To dearest him who lives, alas, away’, became cries to the loved one which neither relieved nor resolved his fear of the ...”

“... the grave. Also excluded from the original edition were, for example, William Jardine and Sir James Matheson, the founders of the famous company which bear their name. Their refusal to agree to Chinese requests to desist from the opium trade led to the disgraceful Opium War of 1840-2, a war which Jardine suggested could be brought to an end by a simple ...”

“... seem like secularised versions of Hopkinsian inscape and Tomlinson’s diction sometimes echoes Hopkins’s own: ‘flank’, ‘pied’, ‘shadow-pied’, ‘unroll’, ‘unshaped’, ‘down-drift’. The informing presence in Hopkins is a specifically sacramental one: Tomlinson manifestly wants to establish a ...”

“... Franks, Edwin Plowden, Robert Hall, Edward Bridges, Alec Cairncross, Edward Hall-Patch, Richard Hopkins and Roger Makins, to name only a few of the ‘mandarins’ who served the Labour Government so loyally. Therein lay the problem, however. They did what their Labour masters wanted, and did it very well. Nationalisation apart (and few of them objected to ...”

“... of the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war; William Perry, the former US secretary of defence; James Mattis, Trump’s future first secretary of defence, who thought that Theranos blood tests would be a ‘game changer’ in battlefield medicine. Naturally, all those men would be useful when it came to winning defence contracts. Fortune put her on its ...”

“... the secreted substance. The leaders were an academic pharmacologist – John Jacob Abel at Johns Hopkins University – and an industrial chemist called Jokichi Takamine who was working in New York for the pharmaceutical company Parke-Davis. Takamine won by being the first to identify – and name – adrenaline, but confusingly Parke-Davis chose to drop the ...”

“... spending much of his time in the 1850s in Dublin establishing a university there. Gerard Manley Hopkins would teach at the place for a miserable four years, and James Joyce, who considered Newman the finest prose stylist in English, would become a student at its successor institution, University College, Dublin. Cornwell ...”

“... was endorsed by most of George W. Bush’s national security team, including Michael Hayden, James Clapper, Robert Blackwill and Richard Haass – a who’s who of the foreign policy establishment. This has led to some barrel-scraping on the part of the Republicans. For director of the CIA, Trump has chosen John Ratcliffe, his final director of national ...”

“... his anxieties about being an ill-educated ‘peasant’. Nevertheless he seized on Heraclitus, Hopkins and James Joyce in particular in his one year as a student and developed demanding tastes in music, literature and art. Graham became a farm-labourer in Galway, travelled with a fair and worked on the docks in Dublin to ...”

“... poem started or where it’s headed but quickly catches up, regardless. If you hear Gerard Manley Hopkins in there you’re hearing correctly, with the stressed syllables at the poem’s beginning clustered together to suggest frenzy and urgency. The syntax is often described as ‘broken’ or ‘crumpled’. Dashes and ellipses indicate discontinuity of ...”

“... reality’. Such poetry invented the self as Keats invented his lovers in their winter castle, or Hopkins the wreck of the Deutschland, or Milton the loss of Paradise: it was indeed a comparable feat of inventive artifice. By contrast, Ashbery’s poetry, warmly admired by Bloom, perfectly illustrates Bloom’s own thesis that ‘the meaning of a poem is ...”

“... be typical of the middlebrow culture whose laureate was Longfellow and whose critical arbiter was James Russell Lowell, and from which Melville, unlike Henry James or Whitman, could not escape. Melville’s doomed attempt, in the late 1840s, to make himself into a country squire at Arrowhead, his farm in the ...”

“... convey another aspect of Larkin the man, but from those quoted, a less interesting one.) And now James Booth, who teaches English at Hull, and has already written two books on the poet (Philip Larkin: Writer, 1992, and Philip Larkin: The Poet’s Plight, 2005), has composed a brief for the defence of Larkin the man (whom he knew slightly at the ...”

“... have hit upon without benefit of the largely psychoanalytic philosophy he developed in his William James lectures of 1982, published as The Thread of Life, and elsewhere. There may seem to be an initial danger of circularity, in that those meanings would be invisible to someone not privy to the psychology enlisted to explain them. My sense, however, is that ...”

“... one reason he slotted so well into its pages. His heroes were the great humourists of the 1940s, James Thurber and S.J. Perelman, and, like them, he often wrote of beleaguered men who struggle with a world that seems to be ...”