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“... tribute to an honest merchant, and the City Poet, Elkanah Settle, a hack versifier derided by Dryden and Pope, wrote a threnody for him which prophesied that this ‘fair Foundation Royal/… Beyond her yet too narrow lease shall stand/With its unshaken head, till time’s last sand.’ This last phrase was borrowed by David Kynaston for the title of his ...”

“... John Sutherland’s pithy, cynical Life of Scott is very much a biography of our time: irreverent, streetwise, set foursquare in a ‘real world’ in which careers achieve money and power and character is at least 51 per cent image. In its worldly wisdom it resembles the first of its kind, John Gibson Lockhart’s pioneering five-volume Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott (1837-8), though the drift of the two Lives is in opposite directions ...”

“... the 20-year-old actor Gabriel Spencer instead of being killed by him), but Thomas Middleton and John Fletcher both died in their mid-forties, Francis Beaumont at thirty, while Henry Porter (whose Two Angry Women of Abingdon influenced The Merry Wives of Windsor) may have been still younger when he was killed in a duel by ...”

“... raged over the latest operatic extravaganza, political squib, court scandal or heretical sermon. Dryden held court at Will’s in Covent Garden, where Pope was later an habitué; Addison patronised nearby Button’s, and the Tory wits the Smyrna in Pall Mall. The Bedford buzzed with theatre folk; Old Slaughter’s in St Martin’s Lane became the ...”

“... where he encountered modern art in the form of pictures by Gauguin, Wilson Steer, Augustus John, William Nicholson, and woodcuts by Kandinsky, collected by the University’s Vice-Chancellor. Frank Rutter, curator of Leeds Art Gallery, completed the boy’s artistic education. He had already begun to write poems, in free verse influenced by ...”

“... of the Burgos junta did. They rested their case on the Indians’ own nature. They began from John Mair, a Scot at the Collège de Montaigu in Paris, who had himself begun from Aristotle. Arguing against the more cautious theologians that Christian doctrine could not be at odds with the ‘true philosophy’, even if that philosophy had been proposed by a ...”

“... vivid informal prose. A master of language, he was, whether or not he sought to be, expert in what Dryden called ‘the other harmony’. In addition to the routine work of editing – the labour of correction, description, identification – Hamilton inevitably had to deal with some intimate details of a famous, tormented and tormenting life. She passes on ...”

“... with the strengths of the ideal modern industrial man: virile, unaffected, passionate.’ Of Dryden: he ‘set, once and for all, the standard of tough clarity, unassuming purity of language, and ironic common sense by which all poetry, sooner or later, is judged’. Zbigniew Herbert’s poems are concerned ‘with his strategies of ...”

“... this deadpan claim to literary originality: Swift lifted these words from the Restoration poet Sir John Denham’s praise of Abraham Cowley: ‘To him no author was unknown,/Yet what he wrote was all his own.’ As it happens, it was Cowley’s rhapsodic style Swift began his career by imitating, so that (he bragged to a cousin in 1692) ‘when I writt what ...”

“... 1640, 24 years after Shakespeare’s death. That edition, however, involved wholesale revision. John Benson, the publisher, capitalising on the undiminished sales of Venus and Adonis, produced a volume of what looked to be not old-fashioned sonnets but new Shakespeare love poems. The transformation involved both format and erotics: many of the sonnets are ...”

“... demands. The investigation into the paradoxical nature of the poetry is urbanely continued by John Wilders, who takes issue with L.C. Knights’s depreciating distinction between the Metaphysical poets and those of the Restoration, as the difference between a poetic inquiry into the complex, contradictory nature of man and the simpler, Hobbist, empiricist ...”

“... Mr Gray’, or some equivalent. By one account, when, near the end of his life, Gray visited St John’s College to meet the son of an acquaintance, ‘every College man took off his cap as he passed, a considerable number having assembled in the quadrangle to see Mr Gray, who was seldom seen.’ Gray managed the difficult feat of becoming admired, even ...”

“... Norman Poser is not Mansfield’s first biographer, but he is arguably the best so far. The first, John Holliday, wrote his not always reliable memoir shortly after Mansfield’s death. Then came Lord Campbell, himself a chief justice, whose biographies of his predecessors became known as one of the new terrors of death, and whose Life of Mansfield contains at ...”

“... Review in 1816, and ‘not like Shakespear’. We tend now to call Pericles a late work but Dryden thought its weaknesses signalled an early play, even a kind of apprentice piece. ‘A slender poet must have time to grow,’ he wrote, trying to forgive. ‘No man can be Falstaff-fat at first.’ The near-total theatrical neglect was partly a result of ...”

“... work more thematically than seems desirable. How fully could one engage with the poetry of Dryden without assessing his politics, or with the lyrics of Adrienne Rich without considering her feminism? It is hard to be sure how seriously Vendler proposes this impoverished remit for criticism because she slips so blurringly from ‘poetry’ to ‘lyric ...”