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“... in war was connected with suffering in love. Even doctors played up the metaphors. The physician John Sintelaer wrote a long treatise on venereal disease called The Scourge of Venus and Mercury (1709), in which he discussed the case of a ‘certain great Officer in the Army’ who ‘had receiv’d a very deep Wound in the Wars of Venus’, and counselled ...”

“... capacities some use which is dubious. Not everything the great do is done in the best fashion.’ Dryden, certainly an admirer, complained with justice that Shakespeare ‘often obscures his meaning with his words’. Dr Johnson, an expert fault-finder, found many faults, without doubting the poet’s powers. Indeed the necessary warnings were first expressed ...”

“... identity distinct from the British, the very fathers of the Republic themselves – Ben Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson – conceived of themselves, at least up to 1776, as Englishmen who happened to live overseas. How could they have thought otherwise? From these pages there rises a weird yearning. Davie, in his modern self-exile, joins in his ...”

“... and Writers of the Couplet. Go straight all the way to Hobbes. Follow Hobbes through The Age of Dryden, then veer left. This brings you face to face with Pope and Swift. You will not have noticed anything in translation. If you do encounter any French political writing, you’ll know you’re in the wrong corridor. You’ll have to make a half-turn and ...”

“... Latin verse. Geoffrey’s story worked through to Holinshed and on to Spenser, Shakespeare and Dryden. It gave us Cymbeline, Lear and Old King Cole, as well as Merlin. But has there ever been a definitive text? It survives with four different dedications, to three different people, singly or paired, and sorting that out is only the start of an immense ...”

“... even foreword mail. An introduction presupposes ignorance. When Albert J. Guerard introduced John Hawkes’s novel The Cannibal in 1948, he could properly feel both Hawkes and his novel were unknown to most readers. But this is what Guerard begins by saying: ‘Many introductions exist to persuade the reluctant reader that the classic text under ...”

“... typewriters. When he died, Wilson was learning Hungarian, part of a new investigative project. John Wain tells how he went to see him and asked him casually what had happened to the Indians round his up-state New York home. Wilson was ashamed that he could not answer the question, investigated it, and produced his book Apologies to the Iroquois. For ...”

“... the footnote he appended, in his 1765 edition of Shakespeare’s plays, to a passage in King John about shoes: – – – slippers, (which his nimble hasteHad falsely thrust upon contrary feet,) I know not how the commentators understand this important passage, which in Dr Warburton’s edition is marked as eminently beautiful, and, on the whole, not ...”

“... resentment of bishops and politicians did not entail hostility from the population at large, and Dryden was able to present him as a ‘second Constantine’, soothing the wounds of Church and state with his ‘healing balm’. This testimony might be considered biased, coming as it did from the poet laureate, but the Declaration of Indulgence of 1687, in ...”

“... Laura Gottschalk in the American magazine Fugitive. Graves had entered into correspondence with John Crowe Ransom, a Fugitive contributor, some years previously, and he wrote at once expressing his admiration. Ransom cautioned Graves in his reply that Laura Riding – she had in the interim cut loose from her first husband – was ‘very fine ...”

“... happens to contain a spelling mistake of his own: the fact that one of his American Modernists is John Ashbery, whose name Stead cannot spell, gives one little confidence in the quality of the information underlying these Modernist choices. Stead is a vigorous writer, and there are pages in this book that are stronger than my review suggests. But it is ...”

“... the golden bough itself with awkward political accommodations. He described the SDLP politician John Hume as an Aeneas seeking to bridge worlds: ‘Neither his long record of political probity nor his large peace-seeking purpose was sufficient to constitute the political equivalent of a golden bough that would guarantee him a safe return from the ...”

“... exactly the same thing.’ In 1934, Jennings, a young artist and intellectual about town, joined John Grierson’s GPO Film Unit on a freelance basis, mainly, it seems, because he was hard up. He went on to become Britain’s most admired wartime documentary film-maker, and although his is far from a household name, his critical reputation has for decades ...”

“... fare. It was true that Don Juan was little understood ‘just now’. His once loyal publisher, John Murray, had backed out after the first five cantos, and the leading periodicals of the time refused on principle to review any of its instalments. (‘We knew not any severity of criticism which could reach the faults or purify the taste of Don Juan,’ the ...”

“... environment, hence the mound of sand, palm tree, curvy lady, unshaven man etc ... In his rewrite, Dryden responded strongly to the idea of a woman who had never seen a marriageable man, inventing, to match her, a man who had never seen a woman (not noticing that in Shakespeare’s play there is already a marvellous study in exactly that, called ...”