“... sympathies, as many ‘conformable puritans’ did in that period. Some biographers believe, as Edward Jones notes in his learned overview of archives relating to the young poet, that Milton lost sympathy with orthodox worship when an inspection of Horton parish church in 1637 required that the raised pew occupied by the Milton family should be lowered and ...”

“... biographers pay too little attention, the words of his second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick. She said that ‘texts had been his life.’ A tycoon’s widow might equally say, and in the same spirit, that ‘money had been his life.’ The sharpest point that Marjorie Perloff makes is to quote from Ian Hamilton’s biography of Lowell, recalling his ...”

“... tired, I’ll just retire to bed.’ The inspector-general of police turned to my parents, and said: ‘I wish all your friends were like that! Where did you find such a cultured guy?’ A week later, when he was looking at pics of the disappeared CP leaders, he saw that the person he’d met at dinner was actually on the most-wanted list! So, it was a ...”

“... everything’ – while there are several books about women who ‘knew too much’. It’s often said that some quite ordinary people ‘know everything’, but that usually comes with qualifications too: you can ‘know everything’ if you win pub quizzes, or you can ‘know everything’ about birdwatching, or baking cakes, or The Archers. But the ...”

“... of Stratford-upon-Avon is the author of the works published in his name: not Sir Francis Bacon, or Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, or Christopher Marlowe, living on in secret after his apparent death in a brawl in 1593 (before most of Shakespeare’s works were written), or one of the more than 50 alternative candidates who have been proposed since the ...”

“... from upstart crow into national bard; there were theoreticians of ‘original composition’ like Edward Young, who set a premium on the rejection of classical models; there were book-trade entrepreneurs whose huge poetry anthologies cashed in on the landmark case of Donaldson v. Becket, which more or less destroyed copyright law; there were the pioneering ...”

“... a tragedy, that the objects I had enjoyed trying to identify – was this Prince Albert or a young Edward VII? – also represented something unknowably private and painful.Objects from the past, if they survive, lose and accrue meaning over time. Their original human associations and contexts, their given purposes and original attractions, dissolve and are ...”

“... that there was anything very equitable about his dealings with them. As the Jacobean diplomat Sir Edward Hoby observed, it was ‘lawful for a Christian to take away anything from infidels’. Pynchon was a restless man and six years after his arrival in America he headed a group of settlers who moved from Massachusetts Bay to a new site. Formerly the home ...”

“... inconceivable. As Mr Brook-Shepherd points out, those who spy for the Soviet Union today, the Edward Howards in the US, the Geoffrey Primes in Britain, are prisoners of venality, lechery or blackmail. Their secrets may be important, but they will not be promoted as ‘internationalist’ models for a future Soviet generation or buried as heroes in ...”

“... have indicated are not for polite society. ‘Strumpet and stomach and damn must never, never be said,’ sang one Victorian vicarage family in the isolation of their nursery. ‘Red, white and blue, dirty kangaroo, sitting on a lamp-post doing number two,’ was what we used to mutter in our Surrey back-garden. My great uncle, a Presbyterian minister, once ...”

“... Word is Our Bond’, which reappears now in The Lords of Limit, a volume which, it must be said, in everything from format to price does very great credit to the publishers. This particular essay has provoked in another attentive reader, John Lucas (LRB, Vol. 5, No 20), the reflection that ‘language cannot be innocent.’ But surely it needs to be ...”

“... Montpellier University and lived several years in France and Belgium. Molotov is reported to have said of him: ‘He is very handsome and leaves a good impression. He is quite cultured but you sense Western influence in his upbringing.’ He has been described as a ‘garrulous charmer’. He was the main political leader in the Resistance and, at 73, is the ...”

“... he at least change that tell-tale K to a C? Because he was too stiff-necked, my mother said, and sighed. And so I became divided in myself; and this too, perhaps, made me seek refuge in the Otherworld. Early on, this otherworld exists for Richard as a Fairyland whose occasions are derived from the Border Ballads, with decor borrowed from artists ...”

“... because her spirit was too independent, too argumentative, too much – as Coleridge shudderingly said – that of a ‘blue-stocking’. She received a uniformly bad press from the poets and their admirers and wives and families because she stuck too loyally to the idea of feminine enlightenment which they in their age were supposed to endorse. She did not ...”

“... Martin Kraus, known to posterity as Martin Crusius, could, by his own admission, ‘rightly be said to be drunk with love for Greek affairs’. To him each new arrival presented an opportunity to learn about the Greeks and their language. Eventually, as Richard Calis writes, Crusius ‘compiled the period’s richest record of Greek life under Ottoman ...”