“... London is equally dark (‘circa Regna tonat’ means ‘it thunders around the throne’): The bell towre showid me suche syght That in my head stekys day and nyght There dyd I lerne out of A grate For all vavore glory or myght That yet circa Regna tonat. By proffe I say the[r] dyd I lerne, Wyt helpythe not deffence to yerne Of innocencie to pled or ...”

“... Though he could be wickedly funny about the limitations of domesticity – he once wrote to Clive Bell that his prescription for too much family life was ‘a letter of Les Liaisons [dangereuses] before going to bed, and a Fleur du mal first thing in the morning’ – life at the Mill House in Tidmarsh and later at Ham Spray in Hungerford seems to have ...”

“... English culture. The MacDiarmid who began to write in Scots had found himself in the position of Stephen Dedalus, who thinks about the English Jesuit dean: ‘My soul frets in the shadow of his language.’ Modernism gains its characteristic effects by wide cultural comparisons frequently involving a language that draws on materials from beyond the ...”

“... Campo Santo. The brilliant colour was the product of a technique the Brothers invented. Quentin Bell, who quotes Holman Hunt’s ‘recipe for painting a Pre-Raphaelite picture’ in his book Victorian Artists, points out that it was a fiendishly difficult way of working. You began by applying a layer of white, from which most of the oil had been ...”

“... of the poetic landscape. Auden and MacNeice, too, though the omission in both books of Stephen Spender suggests that he has slipped out of contention – either because his true worth has yet to be assessed, or because it finally has been. There are also some welcome defining presences. W.S. Graham is well represented with different poems in both ...”

“... his frequent collaborator, the designer Jocelyn Herbert. The nominal producer of The Old Crowd was Stephen Frears, but in real terms it was LWT and its then head of programmes, Michael Grade. Used as I was to the BBC and to my regular producer, Innes Lloyd, I found LWT entirely well-meaning but awkward to work with only because it wasn’t an organisation ...”

“... rhythmic Richmond Lattimore with a lengthy new introduction;* and three hardback copies of the new Stephen Mitchell translation, with refulgent golden shields on the cover and several endorsements on the back, of which the most arresting is by Jaron Lanier, author of You Are Not a Gadget: ‘The poetry rocks and has a macho cast to it, like rap music.’ There ...”

“... since it’s an authorship made up of two people, the challenge is to discover how, like Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, Don Gately and Hal Incandenza, they might ever be brought together at all.) In 2000, DeWitt published a first novel called The Last Samurai; it sold a hundred thousand copies in English, was translated into ten languages and turns up on various ...”

“... gender identity in young people. In October 2020, the High Court conducted a judicial review, Bell v. Tavistock, to determine whether the practice of prescribing puberty blocking treatment to children had been lawful, and also considered whether the information provided to children was sufficient for them to give meaningful consent to treatment. The court ...”

“... what more brilliant if small-scale artists had done in this Latin inscription of 1592 on the fifth bell in the Chapel Tower of Winchester College:  CAELESTESAUDITE SONOS  MORTALESThis says: ‘Bell-notes are prayers from earth to heaven as well as blessings descending to earth from the skies.’ The finest inscriptions ...”

“... are let into a green oasis that operates like the Marshalsea Prison: if you are inside when the bell sounds, you stay the night. Low-level flats, from an era of less boastful regeneration, are set back from the road behind cushions of coarse grass, teardrop flower-beds planted in an attractively random fashion. The latest blocks, blindly monolithic, devour ...”

“... total lack of formal education. So she started writing about the law instead, in pieces about the Stephen Ward and Lady Chatterley trials for Esquire, Jack Ruby for Life, the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial for the Saturday Evening Post. ‘The law, the workings of the law, the daily application of the law to people and situations, is an essential element in a ...”

“... war and the causes of war, a theme which was to her a kind of posthumous discussion with Julian Bell about his decision to go to Spain. She suspected his motives and could not find them altogether admirable. Nicolson’s verdict is that ‘she tried to be rational about war, but her emotion got the better of her logic.’ Her arguments about the connections ...”

“... including NTS, which he ‘quietly supported … by anonymously editing its magazine, the Bell’ after his expulsion from the Soviet Union.Reddaway’s career as a dissident promoter started with Chronicle of Current Events, a survey of repressive Soviet actions prepared by anonymous dissidents in the Soviet Union, which he edited, translated and ...”

“... of The Norton Anthology of English Literature’, published in Critical Inquiry in 2009, quotes Stephen Greenblatt’s emails to his Norton co-editors, telling them that Damrosch aimed to include ‘many texts by Welsh, Irish and Scottish writers, to show that multiculturalism, as it were, begins at home’.But in England itself it was too often taken for ...”