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“... home is a personage from classical poetry rather than 18th-century agriculture. Gray’s friend Thomas Wharton noted: ‘In England the ploughman always quits his work at noon. Gray, therefore, with Milton, painted from books and not from life.’ He did not seem to mean this as a point against the poet, even if Wordsworth would have taken it as a ...”

“... Thomas Hardy, it is said, believed the history of humanity could be written in six words: ‘They lived, they suffered, they died.’ As a historical account this was more than adequate. It depicted change over time, contained a point of view, and encapsulated a universally applicable lesson. What detail the story lacked could be supplied by readers, each in their own way ...”

“... seemed to resist were not Hecht’s Audenesque tendencies, but the further influence of Dylan Thomas and Hart Crane, who could not write without overwriting.Born in 1923 in New York City, Hecht had a privileged but disrupted childhood. His father worked at a fake job paid for by his father-in-law. The boy attended private schools, rarely thriving as a ...”

“... sweet’ when the Saturday Review praised Plain Tales from the Hills, ‘Simla always makes me savage.’ Perhaps the accusations there that his parents were social climbers had made him wary. In the 1890s these defects did no great harm. He would have been mistaken to include moult detail in his poems about the Empire. Criticised for his poem on the ...”

“... year that the Children’s Charter extended new legal protection to the young, the English painter Thomas Gotch portrayed his young daughter in majesty like a Madonna by Duccio, with a huge nimbus around her head, and called the image The Child Enthroned. Concurrently, the Swiss Ferdinand Hodler celebrated the birth of his son with an equally awed work, The ...”

“... as is shown in her account of the night two Africans, one of them recently enslaved, attended Thomas Southerne’s dramatisation of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko at Drury Lane: ‘The young men received a standing ovation as they entered, and during Oroonoko’s final speech, all eyes were on them as much as on the actors. The recent captives wept at the ...”

“... of national politics to address a wider audience of freer thinking international readers. Thomas More’s book of Latin epigrams was the first printed volume of classically derived Latin verse by an Englishman. It appeared first in 1518, bound with the second edition of Utopia, and it shares both the brilliance and the elusively reforming political ...”

“... Punch, ‘thus introducing civilisation to Egypt’. The Egyptians put up with this sort of thing. Thomas Holloway, the great pill-maker, is supposed to have introduced eupepsia to Egypt by advertising his product from the same vantage-point. Punch at least seems to have established a lasting reputation along the Nile, because it was by those shores that the ...”

“... is required to read them, while scholastic writings are heavily abbreviated to save parchment. Thomas Aquinas’s shorthand was so illegible only his secretary could decipher it. Most remarkable is the prolific 13th-century scholar known as the ‘Tremulous Hand of Worcester’, who glossed Old English manuscripts in Latin and Middle English. His shaky ...”

“... by the small magazines, published by Eliot, anthologised by Yeats, and understood, alongside Dylan Thomas, to be one of the chief lyrical men of the age. Anaïs Nin, of all the spotters of seedy excellence, names him in her diaries as the sort of person who might put a pulse into a dull room: George Barker comes, with his dilated Celtic blue eyes, his ...”

“... sense (there is none of the proto-Romantic feeling for the sublimity of nature that animates, say, Thomas Amory’s John Buncle, partly set in Bage’s own county of Derbyshire). What is significant is the author’s resolute provincialism – few if any early English novelists had a more confident indifference to London. That revolutionary ideas might develop ...”

“... from Earls Court, and a legal action brought by Finlay against Fulcrum Press had triggered a savage and self-inflicted defeat for the progressive side. One notable antagonist, Hugh MacDiarmid, puts in an appearance early on. MacDiarmid had been Finlay’s best man, but when Finlay published Glasgow Beasts, an’ a Burd in 1961 the pioneer of synthetic ...”

“... later than Wilson, a black sailor from Boston, was being admired there as a sort of Greek god. Sir Thomas Lawrence found in him the combined perfections of the finest Classical statues, and Benjamin Robert Haydon wrote as enthusiastically about him as he did about the Parthenon Marbles. Having taken separate moulds of all parts of Wilson’s body, Haydon ...”

“... strikes many young readers as a chestnut, maybe even an obstacle on the road to Virginia Woolf, Thomas Pynchon and Alice Walker, while the later novels just look ‘weird’. On the one hand, the author of Women in Love is too damn serious, too damn end-of-the-world to be any fun in a world of MTV; on the other hand, the creator of The Woman who Rode Away ...”

“... by backwoods prophets and club-footed hoodlums, mass murderers and one-armed con-artists, savage saints, drooling idiot boys, tattoo-freaks, wary xenophobes and hick racists: ‘Good Country People’, to borrow the title of a story in which a seemingly innocent Bible salesman seduces an ugly intellectual with a PhD in philosophy, and then steals her ...”