“... Moore (who joined the staff in 1924 and succeeded Thayer as editor), Cummings, William Carlos Williams, Pound and Kenneth Burke. And despite Thayer’s distaste for high modernism (Pound’s Cantos were ‘silly’, Joyce’s later work ‘unreadable’), he resolved to print what few others would touch. He was especially kind to Cummings, who had been ...”

“... and royals (Princess Marina, Queen Victoria Eugénie, the Princess Royal). Vera Brittain, Ivy Williams (‘the first woman to be called to the English bar’) and Rachel Crowdy (she ‘belonged to a generation when women had to possess very obvious strength of character if they were to attain recognition’) are the only women who might be described as ...”

“... striking. Set beside the early work of Pound and Eliot (or of Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams, for that matter), Frost’s ‘simple’ lyrics might have seemed to be some sort of throwback – as if they belonged far down the back slope of the great Modernist watershed. But those same unassuming poems earned Pound’s immediate praise, and ...”

“... Italiano, latino e francese’ by Annibale Antonini (1770) The most important fixer was Thomas Jenkins, who began as a dealer, became a banker and ended up as de facto British consul in Rome. His name is everywhere in the exhibition, one of the largely forgotten figures whose importance it recovers. Elsewhere the story is in parts familiar. There ...”

“... official dogma. Haywood had links by this time with known Jacobites like the Welsh MP Sir Watkin Williams Wynn, whose Tory programme King sees as ‘close to representing Haywood’s own political feelings’. Yet in the so-called ‘Goring pamphlet’ that finally got her arrested in 1749, written in the voice of ‘one of the Gentlemen of the Bedchamber to ...”

“... ambition which has dominated philosophy since the 17th century – that of reaching what Bernard Williams calls an ‘absolute conception of reality’. The aim is to achieve a comprehensive understanding of the world, consistent with modern science, which distinguishes between what exists objectively, independent of our minds, and what is merely subjective ...”

“... William Walton (1902) and Lennox Berkeley (1903), with the reassuring presence of Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872) hovering over them all. Whether Tippett ever entered the pantheon, or even deserves to, remains an open question for some. His Concerto for Double String Orchestra (1939) might slot seamlessly into a concert programme of English string pieces like ...”

“... of Calvinist attitudes in the writings of David Hume, Jonathan Edwards, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson, among others. Far from a mechanical application of rigid doctrinal categories, Manning’s thoughtful critique shows how contradictory attitudes can arise out of, and in reaction to, a common adherence to absolutes. Her ...”

“... something of an oversimplification, but not all that much. The tradition is rich and unbroken: in Thomas Elyot’s Latin dictionary of 1538 we find aedificium ‘building’, in Bullokar’s English dictionary of 1616 the minimally anglicised edifice ‘a building’, in the 1979 Collins edifice ‘a building’. For all their bright newness, dictionaries of ...”

“... and Shakespeare and Donne, through Milton and Blake and Keats, to David Jones, Gascoyne, Dylan Thomas, Nicholas Moore, to Lee Harwood’s Cable Street, Bill Griffiths’s Whitechapel and Brian Catling’s The Stumbling Block. London infected its interpreters, soliciting contributions to an open-ended project. The names of the poets were the stanzas of a ...”

“... its feet.’ Others ping around emptiness, or bring out the potential for rewriting William Carlos Williams in the form’s short lines: ‘the dog/barks at/the red/lawnmower/Is it/time/for lunch?’ The flat long lines of the top and bottom of the quennet give the effect of a long Essex horizon, around which an eye may dart and pick out things in their ...”

“... consciously controlled professional technique. It was a struggle away from everything Vaughan Williams seemed to stand for.’ Vaughan Williams taught composition at the RCM, but Britten bypassed him anyway. Since the age of 14 he had been having lessons with Frank Bridge; his mother would take him to London in the ...”

“... greatest symphonist since Beethoven, had no interest in folksong (though he studied with Vaughan Williams and liked and respected him), adored jazz for its virtuosity and instrumental sound but had little patience with most of the so-called symphonic jazz of the 1920s. The key to this apparent ragbag of a pantheon is that Lambert had come to music from ...”

“... by the boundless optimism of these pieces, muted and delicate as they are. Praising William Carlos Williams especially as ‘not a repeater of things secondhand’, she quotes Pound’s verdict that there could be an ‘age of awakening in America’ which would ‘overshadow the quattrocento’, since ‘our opportunity is greater than Leonardo’s’ and ...”

“... project was a live one, working hard, after paying its respects, to defuse the purple excesses of Thomas De Quincey’s On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts. This is P.D. James at her best; the fastidious dabbling in horror, the forensic eye finding order in chaos. Now, 22 years later, with the oven-ready blockbuster, Original Sin, she returns to ...”