“... often the same people, so were poets and politicians. Five Tudor politicians of stature – More, Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney, Ralegh – wrote enduring literature. In our time MPs and former Cabinet ministers sometimes try their hand at popular fiction, but somehow the results are not quite the same. Alongside the major literary names there were numerous minor ...”

“... in fact the Times’s losses were covered by the Sunday Times’s profits. The appalling Woodrow Wyatt later gloated that he had fixed this as go-between from Murdoch to Thatcher, and he may have been right. As soon as he had the papers, Murdoch began rearranging their editors, with Evans shunted from Sunday to daily, a mistake in itself, and telling them ...”

“... was sculpting Henry VII for Westminster Abbey. But, though there were notable writers (Skelton, Wyatt, More, the great translators of the Bible like Tyndale), the country’s literary culture was relatively thin: it lacked character and cohesion. By the end of the 16th century, the picture had reversed. The great architectural and sculptural achievements ...”

“... a queen, dig the Suez Canal. Present her with India. You can’t beat that, it’s better than Wyatt Earp.’ And it’s as good as Lord Byron. Take the life of Disraeli, for ‘novelist’ read ‘poet’, and you’ve got an epic about what happened to Byron after he’d recovered from that deadly fever at Missolonghi. Having fought for Greek ...”

“... minimal. It’s a bit like trying not to miss the earthy, textured solidity of Chaucer, or Thomas Wyatt, when you read Petrarch: you have to learn not to want that particular localised moonlit wood. It’s just ‘the wood’. In fact Leopardi was writing out of an intense attachment to the landscape around his home in Recanati, in the Marche, 15 miles from ...”

“... keeps delivering.As well as Epstein and Maxwell it can offer such bit players as John Bryan; Steve Wyatt, ‘a hunky Texan oilman’, and his biological father, Bobby Lipman (who killed a young woman while tripping); Ruth, Lady Fermoy; Major Ron Ferguson’s loyalty to the Wigmore Club (a massage parlour); the queen mother’s lodged fishbone; James ...”

“... Ralegh’s best verse combines the jaded worldliness of the earlier court poetry of Sir Thomas Wyatt with delicate structures of fantasy. The effect is very often that of an imagination projecting a fragile and wonderfully unreal creation while knowing that it will end in failure or disaster. The delicious poem ‘Nature that washt her hands in ...”

“... two most extensive collections of early Tudor verse: the Egerton Manuscript of poems by Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Arundel Harington Manuscript, which contains a miscellany of poems from the 16th century, many of which may have come into the hands of Harington’s father when he was imprisoned in the Tower during Mary’s reign. These documents constitute the ...”

“... work a lustre of elusive plurality, as though the poet had wanted his readers to ask: ‘Who needs Wyatt and Surrey and Vaux when Gascoigne can blend all their voices into one? And what’s more be a sober moralist too.’ He failed in this ambition. And the main reason Gascoigne’s Hundreth Sundrie Flowres has been so unlucky is that the book itself is a ...”

“... criticism allows only subsidiary places to the strenuous translation of Psalms by Sir Thomas Wyatt or Sir Philip Sidney (the ‘Sidneian Psalms’ acclaimed by a poem of Donne) or Milton. Yet Donne himself, who worried whether poetry was equal to the expression of divine truth unless a divine spirit directed it, maintained that the ‘tropes and ...”

“... equivalent of the pleasure gardens of Vauxhall and Ranelagh, and the neoclassical design by James Wyatt was thought by Gibbon to be ‘the wonder of the 18th century and the British Empire’. It was visited by Boswell and Johnson, featured in Fanny Burney’s Evelina, illustrated by Turner and caricatured by Rowlandson, so that it lives in historic memory as ...”

“... than ‘sharpened’. If this is ‘the best Victorian verse’, it is verse that disregards Wyatt and Campion and Pope before it as certainly as, after it, it disregards Pound and the young Eliot. Such blank verse – the unrhymed, relentlessly regular pentameter – can be squeezed out like toothpaste, ignoring the audibie shape of any one verse-line ...”

“... the famous passage of Seneca’s Thyestes, that touchstone of Stoic poetry in England from Wyatt to Marvell, where ‘the slippery height of the court’ is renounced in favour of the ‘pleasant ease’ and ‘quiet leisure’ of obscurity. The passage is quite in keeping with the general tone of the Politics. We can certainly identify a more ...”

“... with later examples. In 1983, Elvis Costello’s poignant ‘Shipbuilding’ (sung by Robert Wyatt) was so sidelong a comment on the human costs and economic benefits of the Falklands War that you had to be told that’s what it was. I even have a sneaking sympathy for the campaign agent who chose Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born in the USA’ (1984) as a ...”

“... on for several minutes about the pink champagne, the eclectic company (the unsinkable Woodrow Wyatt still Keeping Left in those days), Dalton’s booming political anecdotes, and so forth. There was a moment of embarrassed silence down the line before the researcher said: ‘That’s not what it says in the diary’. As I subsequently worked out, my ...”