“... to attend its weekly lectures. Such amateur societies were the main forum for the study of English poetry (the academic discipline of literature still confined itself to the ancient Greeks and Romans). But it also provided its members with something else: a chance to own reprints of Shelley’s more obscure and early writings.Wise took charge of ...”

“... Barton, ranging from American luminaries like Jonas Barish and Stephen Orgel to newcomers like Richard Rowland (who contributes a thumpingly good piece on Heywood). Shakespeare is still the most challenging object in the literary canon, the most generous with meaning and, at the same time, the most apt to find out folly in those who would interpret ...”

“... Of all the great English poets, Dryden must be the least enjoyed. Once honoured ‘rather in the stiffness than in the strength of his eminence’, he was soon ‘laid carefully away among the heroes’, according to Mark Van Doren, the critic who is still, nearly a century on, the most persuasive of his would-be resurrectors ...”

“... has been the dark period of the Church of England: the middle ground lost between books on the English Revolution and the Elizabethan Church on the one side, and studies of religion in the English Revolution on the other. Lancelot Andrewes and John Donne are subjects: literature has seen to that. And so is ...”

“... France displayed a more radical profile than Tory England, and a polity more attractive to the English liberal Whig than Catholic, Inquisitorial Spain and Portugal. Decidedly a liberal Whig, Byron abstains pointedly from cheering on the war effort. He denounces our Portuguese allies as cowardly and murderous, and sees the Spanish resistance as compromised ...”

“... a vote censuring the Chamberlain government for its failure to supply British troops in Norway. As Richard Davenport-Hines records, the minister of health spat on Profumo’s shoe after he passed through the lobbies. The Tory chief whip told him that he was ‘an utterly contemptible little shit’. Even for a headstrong young man it was a remarkably ...”

“... of Cornish design and granite sold in various sizes by large department stores.’There was no English or imperial tradition of monumental memorials, no exemplars such as von Klenze’s Walhalla high above the Danube. There was no Arc de Triomphe, no Lincoln Memorial. Calton Hill possesses a hallucinatory grandeur, but Scotland was not a model for the War ...”

“... their carrot and stick ways by the Wellesley brothers (Arthur, the future duke of Wellington, and Richard). They took Low under their wing. His career as company handyman had begun. Men like Low were crucial to company rule in India. When he arrived in Jaipur in 1825 on his first big posting, the company’s resources were at full stretch. Two ...”

“... exacerbated the hardship. There were tense confrontations with the Dutch traders and the other English settlements further down the Connecticut Valley; and, although Pynchon claimed to believe in treating them as equals, there was open conflict with the Native Americans. Gaskill remarks that most colonists believed the natives to be, at least ...”

“... The author of ‘Naming of Parts’, probably the most anthologised English poem of the Second War, has too often been held to be that and that only. Like Julian Grenfell, author of ‘Into Battle’, he is seen as the saddest freak of the literary fairground: the one-poem poet. The publication of his collected poems will give the lie to that gross misperception ...”

“... Angela Carter as the wolf-infested forest of Germanic folklore – or, for that matter, as a wet English wood. Another overture – ‘Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ – puts on record the thoughts of the Changeling, that bone of contention between Oberon and Titania, here dubbed ‘the Golden Herm’, short for ...”

“... once said, ‘the soul of fact’. Beryl Bainbridge was one of the last of the pre-Google English novelists, the last, you might say, following Coleridge, for whom facts had a soul and were not simply pluckable. Take her novel Master Georgie, set in the Crimean War. While reading it, I decided to do a little background research. It was super-easy to ...”

“... reformers. A recent impressive book by Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village,* suggested that Calvinist theology became especially acceptable to parish élites, the minority who were prospering in the great economic divide of the late 16th and early 17th centuries, as against the mass of the poor who were subsiding into ...”

“... Nowhere are these contradictions and incoherences more visisbly acted out than in the career of Richard Nixon. It was Wills’s great achievement to show this in his one first-rate book – Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man (1970). That Nixon was, had to be, an aberration came to be an article of faith for almost everyone. What Wills showed ...”

“... make Pound extraordinary not the least is that he is a great writer – the only one writing in English – who lived through and recorded what it felt like to be defeated in the Second World War. I concentrate for the moment on The Pisan Cantos because that seems to me, as it does to Anthony Woodward, Pound’s ‘greatest achievement’. Everything that ...”