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“... body to his feet. The Englishman he was talking about, cursed and pulped, was Lieutenant Walter Herbert Ingram, who had fought in South Africa in the Anglo-Zulu War and travelled up the Nile to Khartoum in the hope of helping General Gordon’s forces. In Luxor, he bought a sarcophagus from the British consul for £50, ‘as a kind of souvenir of his ...”

“... 1969, as part of its series of modern European poets. Popa was then usually grouped with Zbigniew Herbert and Miroslav Holub, two other astonishingly original East European poets, whose work was plainly unlike anything being written in Britain and the United States. Encountering in Popa an exotic blend of avant-garde poetry and popular folklore, the foreign ...”

“... by the painter’s estate and swooned over by the market, still a fake? What does intention matter if your audience doesn’t care about it? Michael ‘Butcher’ Boone, one of the two narrators of Theft, is a once famous Australian artist, newly divorced and down on his luck. His work is now very unfashionable, and he has retreated to a rustic house in ...”

“... known translation of Madame Bovary was undertaken from a fair copy of the manuscript by Juliet Herbert, governess to Flaubert’s niece Caroline, in 1856-57. Quite possibly, she was Gustave’s lover; certainly, she gave him English lessons. ‘In six months, I will read Shakespeare like an open book,’ he boasted; and together they translated Byron’s ...”

“... what gives them these entitlements, or, if this is thought a tendentious way of putting the matter, what makes the claim that they possess them true? In the Declaration of Independence, the most famous and eloquent expression of the American theory of rights, what endows human individuals with such rights is, intractably enough, their Creator. All human ...”

“... was simply another tool in the shed. She wanted to exercise the freedom Stein practised as a matter of course, or that Burroughs assigned himself in several books before returning to a (drastically loosened) form of cohesive storytelling – the freedom poetry enjoys over prose. What Acker really intended, and sometimes achieved, was a fusion of writing ...”

“... in the right way ... Greatness is not a state that poets really seek; greatness is a matter, so far as we are concerned, of chance, of what happens afterwards when we are dead; and that depends upon a great many things outside of ourselves. He concludes that ‘the important poets will be those who have taught the people speech,’ alluding for ...”

“... status that the period accorded to literary translation – the King James Bible. Donne and George Herbert were only the most conspicuous clergy-poets of their time. Milton would have joined their number had he not been repelled by the ‘popish’ trend of the Caroline Church. Devotional poems of Herbert and Milton are ...”

“... profession of literary study’. Writing a love letter to the profession, rather than the subject matter, of literary study may well be the most daring and original aspect of the book. Many literature professors have declared their undying love for reading and teaching, but few have admitted to loving the academic game itself. More typically, they view ...”

“... first issued in 1978 to accompany an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art and at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum, put more stress than Russell does upon the influence of the European exiles in the late 1930s and less upon the buoyant optimism of America in the late 1940s. The debt to Picasso in the American art of this period is well-known, but the ...”

“... can’t expect a civilisation or grumble if they don’t.’ As for Eliot’s feelings on the matter: the whole thing threatened to become more of an embarrassment than a release. Although he certainly disliked his job, he was not so sure about giving it up on the basis of a single year’s subscription. For him, the garret option was unappealing: ‘I ...”

“... England’s distinctive sense of self? Probably the most useful descriptor is Whiggism, after Herbert Butterfield’s incisive dissection in The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) of the tendency ‘to emphasise certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present’. There ...”

“... of resources on pregnancy and motherhood direct our eyes and minds to issues that don’t actually matter in the grand scheme of things. The problems we face are much bigger: a culture in which men hold nearly all of the legal and economic power; a society in which whiteness is considered the norm … an economic system that relies on, but does not adequately ...”

“... My subject-matter is subject-matter. Is it true, as it sometimes seems, that certain subjects are inevitably more interesting than others, however much we may protest that they are merely different? For instance, does Robert Lowell’s Life Studies intrigue us more than, say, Tony Harrison’s family reminiscences in Continuous? If so, is it because Lowell’s technique is more sophisticated and fluid than Harrison’s vigorously clanking sonnet sequence in which the rhymes come like a boisterous game of snap? Or is it because the Lowell family tree is richer in eccentricity and event than that of Harrison? Where Lowell can boast a Great Aunt Sarah thundering ‘on the keyboard of her dummy piano’ and ‘risen like the phoenix / from her bed of trouble-some snacks and Tauchnitz classics’, Harrison’s relations are more familiar figures, bickering on Blackpool’s Golden Mile or locked into their ordinarily absurd theatre of non-communication: Your life’s all shattered into smithereens ...”

“... of such doctrines as historicism, scientism and poetism; there is (after a balanced judgment) Herbert Spencer, whose ‘system of general evolution does not really work’; and then IQ psychologists, who ‘give the impression of being incapable of learning anything from anybody’; and everyone else who doubts the hope of progress, such as Francis ...”