“... is at all events one way forward, and the way that Hill has taken in his Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy, and in other poems also. John Lucas, once he has admitted that British English has lost its innocence, seems to have no firm footing for distinguishing, as he tries to do, acceptable from unacceptable depravities (decadent refinements) that ...”

“... the author, ‘is not even an 18th-century Scottish word.’ My respect for the past goes up. Charles Camic believes, I think, that the great men of the Enlightenment could pioneer new areas of thought only if they had been removed from their fathers’ influence at an early age, and later subjected to university in large, impersonal classes. So Adam ...”

“... same rope?’ It was not noticed until some time after Laurence Sterne’s death in 1768 that this passage was itself plagiarised from Robert Burton’s attack on literary imitators in his introduction to The Anatomy of Melancholy. ‘As apothecaries,’ Burton observed, ‘we make new mixtures every day, pour out of one vessel into another … Again, we weave ...”

“... University in Baltimore in 1933. At that time his main reason for being in America was to give the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, duly published as The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. In a year that would have seemed laborious even to a writer not suffering from marital disaster and general ill-health, Eliot added to his Harvard commitment ...”

“... the joins and touched up the weirdness. Writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne in Tanglewood Tales and Charles Kingsley in The Heroes, who enthralled me when I was a child devouring the stories under the bedclothes by torchlight, patched and pieced the myths into the coherent plots that we are familiar with. Writers continue to work a ragbag of scraps into whole ...”

“... and early August 1943 and caused the first deliberately ignited firestorm. It is part of a longer passage printed in Appendix 30 of the official British history of the bombing of Germany by Charles Webster and Noble Frankland, and demonstrates their relentless objectivity (all the more remarkable in a book published in ...”

“... the prophet lies not just in the events he may foretell, but in the tension he introduces into the passage of time, offering scansion to what is otherwise an open and indifferent cascade of events. A prophecy that God will take revenge by fire, famine and whirlwind on the iniquities of humanity is not intended to encourage sinners to start boarding up their ...”

“... He seemed always to be in the right place at the right time: he was there for the execution of Charles I, and on the ship that brought Charles II back from exile. He watched London burn in September 1666 from the window of his house, and felt ‘a shower of Firedrops’ on his face. He experienced the terror of the Dutch ...”

“... long and successful struggle against the opposing forces of evil. He explained to his editor, Charles Monteith, that Matty in Darkness Visible was meant to be a saint, like Simon and the curé d’Ars and St Thérèse of Lisieux. ‘It’s a figure I’ve tried for again and again and I suppose Matty in Darkness Visible is as near as I shall ever ...”

“... Pushkin’s various notes are not fully reproduced in D.M. Thomas’s new translation, nor in Sir Charles Johnston’s of 1981). But ambiguity has always surrounded the statue, along with its imperial subject. The city which stood for a modernised and liberalised Russia was said to have cost a hundred thousand lives in the building, and the intended ...”

“... against the international Catholic menace. In the 1640s, the Parliament which fought against Charles I condemned his indifference to the Dutch plight. In 1648-9, both countries renounced their foreign rulers, the Dutch finally breaking free from what they held to be the Popish tyranny of Spanish rule, the English Parliament repudiating what it held to be ...”

“... over the ruins of a town, burying beneath the rubble newly minted coins that bear the image of Charles II. This least remembered of the outposts of the fledgling British Empire is nearing its end. For more than a decade it had been a thriving commercial port, in which Charles, who had acquired it in 1661 when he married ...”

“... at III.i, 68-78. I have cheated slightly by removing a single line, but even so this passage would look much more at home in the speech in which the old king tells Cordelia’s hitherto enthusiastic suitor Burgundy that her price is now fallen than it does in its actual dramatic context. The speech forms part of a long, irrelevant piece of ...”

“... telling the whole tale takes second place to displaying scholarly achievement. ‘The story of the passage of the Great Reform Bills has often been told,’ we read, ‘and it is not the intention to repeat it in detail here.’ As a result, the most important episode in Grey’s career is the one which receives the least adequate treatment. The period between ...”

“... on the Westmorland are now lost, a pair of priapic marble fauns belonging to the collector Charles Townley. In their catalogue essay Jonathan Yarker and Clare Hornsby follow Townley’s attempts to retrieve his property and the unhappy fate of the fauns who were last seen in Madrid a few years later, so drastically modified that they were listed as ...”