“... although often unexceptionable – it lacks intellectual force and doesn’t seem hard-won. Blake is meant to be a significant presence in A Bottle in the Smoke, both as a poet and as the subject of Gilchrist’s Life, and his view that ‘the inner world is all-important’ is appealed to more than once. But Julian’s re-creation of his former life ...”

“... are followed by essays on authors once widely read outside the academy – Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Burns, Lamb and Southey – in which Johnston asks what effect Pitt’s alarm had on the development of English literature, particularly on ‘that great body of work we call Romantic. It was not good for it, evidently, but just how bad was it?’ The ...”

“... founded the school in Dulwich that her father attended. Although not an amateur like Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey or Allingham’s Albert Campion, Inspector Alleyn is quietly well-connected, a younger son who went to Eton and Oxford and then entered the diplomatic service, but left because he couldn’t stick the terms of the Paris Peace Conference; his ...”

“... a message that echoed around the Dinaric peaks: ‘Uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh – Blake! Krystle! All dead!’ The boy bore news from distant Hollywood: the elders of the Carrington clan, the central characters in Dynasty, had met a sticky end. The crime that induced shock in audiences across the United States had not been perpetrated by a ...”

“... revive the decayed industrial estuaries of the Tyne, the Tees, the Mersey and the Clyde; sending Lord Hailsham up to the North-East in a cloth cap was an embarrassing afterthought, which only drew attention to the threadbare nature of Macmillan’s economic policy. The Middle Way (1938), his most substantial and influential political tract, was, as Thorpe ...”

“... lost at sea in pursuit of a design to return 144,000 Jews to the Holy Land. Tany recorded: ‘The Lord came upon me in power . . . and fell upon me in my shop.’ He was struck dumb, blind and insensible ‘in the beholding of hundreds of men’. There is a danger of patronising, even mocking, these mid-17th-century religious prodigies. Even Alexander ...”

“... For whom the stars move and their breath is fire – it hardly tries to give us Dionysus, the lord of dancing. Altogether the choruses are less richly rendered than they are in the translation by Robert Fagles, but the austerity is deliberate and this whole work is very cool and restrained. It results from an independent approach to Sophocles, and the ...”

“... for example, ‘and what if the sword contemne euen the rodde? it shall be no more, sayth the Lord GOD’ (Ezekiel 21. 13). Originally, these italicised words would have appeared in discreetly smaller type amid the robust black-letter, indicating their auxiliary status: now, because of the different use to which we put them, the italicised words shout ...”

“... he is persuaded. I think I am temperamentally a mystic, he says. He believes Wordsworth and Blake and George Fox and Philip K. Dick. But he excludes from the dimension of greater meaning the ascetic practices of the modern day. We engage in them, certainly: ‘hot yoga, ceaseless meditation, extreme fasting, various forms of detox, excessive exercise ...”

“... resenting them. In these childhood writings, this tension is resolved in the figure of the Byronic lord, at once rebellious and respected, in whom it is not hard to see a dry run for Jane Eyre’s Mr Rochester. A kind of upper servant, at home neither in the kitchen nor in the drawing-room, the Victorian governess was a painfully displaced figure, at once ...”

“... The New Jim Crow, Jesmyn Ward’s anthology The Fire This Time, James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird and the poet Claudia Rankine’s award-winning Citizen. In a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, on receiving the MacArthur ‘Genius’ grant, Rankine acknowledged as much: ‘To me, the getting of this honour is … the culture saying: “We ...”

“... by the break with Catholicism. However, he also supports things as they are, and rather like Lord Denning on the need to accept the guilty verdict on the Birmingham Six, he can’t face the ‘appalling vista’ of a whole system – the culture that made and empowered him – which is built, from a Catholic point of view, on systematic lies and ...”

“... men such as Johnson, Reynolds, Burke and Goldsmith were joined by establishment figures such as Lord Ossory (made a member in 1777) and Viscount Althorp (made a member in 1778), the first peers to be elected. By the time of Johnson’s death, there were seven peers and three bishops, with men of affairs now outnumbering men of letters. Johnson wasn’t the ...”

“... a century or less the dominant or most impressive voices would be those of forthright rejection, Blake (in a passage Fagles quotes) saying that the classics of the old culture were desolating Europe with wars, or Byron insisting that the murderousness of real wars and that of the Homeric epic were one and the same thing. Addison seems to have regarded ...”

“... his villain a Labour intellectual who becomes a life peer and bears the transparent soubriquet of Lord Frost. And yet the modern intelligence services owed at one time a considerable debt to the writers of spy stories – in particular to William Le Queux and Phillips Oppenheim. Le Queux’s hero, Duckworth Drew, whose name rhymed with his own and whose ...”