“... well expressed by Patrick Kavanagh, a friend of his from wartime Dublin: Give us another poem, he said Or they will think your muse is dead; Another middle-aged departure Of Apollo from the trade of archer. In January 1960 Evelyn Waugh declared that he and Betjeman, along with Elizabeth Bowen and L.P. Hartley, had lost their edge as writers. In these often ...”

“... his career in the service of the Marathas, and sired numerous part-Indian children by (it was said) 16 wives and mistresses. In a small yard outside the church, members of his multi-ethnic clan lie buried. Some of their tombs have crosses on top and epitaphs on the side in Persian – memorials to a period in Anglo-Indian history when European and Eastern ...”

“... his SDP adventure, and his Presidency of the European Commission – none of which can be said to illuminate the main story in any significant way. Both are anxious to establish Churchill’s ‘greatness’. Best incorporates the word into his subtitle; Jenkins finishes his book – rather feebly, in view of all the much more interesting points that ...”

“... employed in, say, Keele, or Leeds, this might never have happened. So there is something to be said after all for the location of the University of Cambridge, which, as its denizens tend to complain, is a dank sort of fenny place with nothing to protect it from the chill winds of Siberia but the low hills of the Urals. Some thought that Duffy’s great ...”

“... family annuities expired. He so inhabited his dour poetic persona that his friend and publisher Edward Hookham, writing to the Literary Fund, ‘had but too just reason to dread that the Fate of Chatterton might be that of Peacock’. The committee awarded him £30. Numerous failed courtships intensified the gloom. Peacock was, his cousin remembered, ‘a ...”

“... workers. Its publication made him a household name at the age of 27. Meat consumption in the US is said to have dipped for several years after the novel appeared. Some of its influence can be attributed to the backing of President Roosevelt (‘the greatest publicity man of that time’, according to Sinclair), who sent the young author a three-page analysis ...”

“... Nato and supposedly a favoured pastime of its namesake. He wasn’t as agitated as Ingraham but he said that if 84 per cent of Iowan Democrats under the age of thirty were supporting a self-declared socialist it was a sign that American high schools weren’t teaching economics properly. In northern Connecticut, Rush Limbaugh occupied multiple frequencies on ...”

“... likely to be seen as settling a score rather than diagnosing the ills of the literary marketplace. Edward St Aubyn, whose new novel, Lost for Words, is a satirical farce about the machinations behind a famous literary prize, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2006 with Mother’s Milk, but lost out to Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss. ‘Ego’ can ...”

“... marry in 1863. Years later, when he tried to explain his decision to marry Susan Pollexfen, Yeats said that her family genius ‘for being dismal’ was, he felt, what he needed. ‘Indeed it was because of this I took to them and married my wife. I thought I would place myself under prison rule and learn all the virtues.’ After Trinity, Yeats studied to ...”

“... cross a ‘red line’: ‘Assad’s government gassed to death over a thousand people,’ he said. ‘We know the Assad regime was responsible … And that is why, after careful deliberation, I determined that it is in the national security interests of the United States to respond to the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons through a targeted ...”

“... who commended it to the King, and some of its polished repartee, as Winn and others have said, may owe something to Rochester. But the song, though as good as Rochester, isn’t like Rochester. If Rochester in the ‘Allusion’, and Shadwell in The Medal of John Bayes (1682), accused Dryden of clumsy attempts to ape the rakish idiom, some of the ...”

“... that [Wallace] Stevens ... spoke of his recent poem, “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction”. “I said that I thought we’d reached a point at which we could no longer really believe in anything unless we recognised it was a fiction.” Exactly. The ‘place’ was Hartford, Connecticut, but it could have been anywhere. When the American writer travelled to ...”

“... a bare three years since the first Jacobite Rising had attempted to place the Old Pretender, James Edward Stuart, on the throne, and although the Murrays were well-known Jacobites, the family was well enough connected to ensure that, when he reached London, William was able to enter Westminster School and then Christ Church, Oxford, at both of which he shone ...”

“... biting for a Christian’ – and here Erasmus ends and Burton begins – ‘not I, but Democritus said it.’ Sterne was himself a divine who had been accused of speaking too lightly, of indulging in extravagant praise of folly, and his Burton-inspired defence is that he, Sterne, was simply adopting a persona. The hybrid allusion links him with two earlier ...”

“... a Van Dyck beard so white it looks dyed. In all so distinguished a figure that some Wamps wag once said of him that when he comes shambling along to the club the very dogs in the street stop smelling one another and bow to him. And then, that Olympian name! Removed from fame by a bare letter. Before the poet died many a Wamp must have felt a small thrill of ...”