“... seen in Europe as civilisation’s diadem: a great poet who was also a patrician. Whereas a noble lord who wrote verse could scarcely be conceived as being more than a figure of fun in contemporary English circles, the rhapsodies which greeted Lowell’s early poems in the American press surely indicated a deep if obscure feeling that the USA had, in the ...”

“... extension, and concealed in itself the seeds of rapid increase’. In the treason trials of 1794, Lord Chief Justice Eyre described the LCS as ‘so composed, as to be spreading itself every hour from division to division, and each division producing its sub-divisions, those sub-divisions becoming divisions, and so on ad infinitum . . . it is indeed a ...”

“... the liberal Enlightenment, a politics from which this volume is not light-years remote. William Blake thought that art should not be too obvious in case it fell into the rationalist trap of false transparency; but he was also quick to see how cults of mystery were exploited by both priest and king to legitimate their power. There is no reason to assume that ...”

“... deceived’ – yet ‘there are many of the tender-spirited elect of God among them’ whom the Lord in due time will call back again (Sacred Remains). Two years later John Reeve was writing to Christopher Hill (that scholar of astonishing longevity, who was then earning his living as a heel-maker in Maidstone) describing how ‘one of the chief speakers of ...”

“... appeared; Dietrich and Garbo played her on the screen. In one episode of the long-running Sexton Blake series, Plummer, an arch-villain, meets a ‘devilishly beautiful’ dancer from French Indo-China called Vali Mata-Vali: ‘She was dressed in a jacket and harem pantaloons of heavy silk . . . her hair was black as a moonless night . . . Plummer was an ...”

“... read with fascination abroad, but that other countries wanted national bards, and other poets from Blake to Whitman tried on bardic robes. Ossian’s first major rivals, predictably enough, came from close to home. They were Robert Burns and William Shakespeare. It was partly in response to Ossianmania that Shakespeare came to be hailed as a bard (he had ...”

“... jump-cuts of a career begun as a teenager when Moorcock hacked out Tarzan Adventures, Sexton Blake thrillers and camp-fire yarns of the purple sage. ‘At the age of 17, sitting in a dark little room in South London in the late 1950s,’ he wrote in the introduction to Tales from the Texas Woods, ‘I earned a wonderful living writing about an Arizona ...”

“... which tells of his attempt to keep afloat a magazine, the Liberal, under the sponsorship of Lord Byron – with an opening salvo against Byron’s hanger-on Tom Moore: I was sorry to find the other day, on coming to Vevey, and looking into some English books at a library there, that Mr Moore had taken an opportunity, in his ‘Rhymes on the ...”

“... and had no domestic attachments to fulfil or distract him. In the 1970s, the Tory historian Robert Blake dismissed speculation on his sexuality with the testy claim that he was simply one of those men who find getting married too much hassle. Rhodes would probably not have declared himself a homosexual, if he had known the word: he did not need to, living on ...”

“... be heard in the speeches of Satan and, such as they are, of God in Paradise Lost, which induced Blake to say that Milton was of the Devil’s party and Emerson to say, after Blake, that ‘if I am the Devil’s child I will live then from the Devil’; it can be heard more genially in the verbal duels of Hotspur and ...”

“... accommodating Dissent gave way to ranting Methodism and the amorphous tolerance of the Unitarians. Blake, in this view, was already a Dissenter without a tradition, and Lawrence, in spite of his proclaimed Nonconformist credentials, was just a heathen who knew some hymns. ‘They still had the Puritan tradition of no ritual,’ Lawrence said of the ...”

“... uncharitable interim biographies and Alan Franks, in the Times magazine of 31 March, talking of Blake Morrison’s South of the River coming out ‘just as Blair contemplates his awful decline from resourceful young bushytail to mangy endgame quarry’. But however much future historians may discover which is unknown to the commentators of the present ...”

“... him to various other forms of secrecy’. He was to become a government spy when Robert Harley was Lord High Treasurer (effectively Prime Minister) and he uses the word ‘secret’ obsessively in Crusoe (it occurs five times on one page). Novak sees his experience of prison and the survival strategies to which it led as crucial to his personality, commenting ...”

“... millions of years back, have stood around the Throne of God. I will address him. Mighty one, my Lord, my Guardian Spirit, all hail. Hearing it unexpectedly I can’t think what it is this reminds me of until Gerontius gets to ‘I will address him,’ and I realise it’s Gilbert and Sullivan, or Gilbert at any rate, the period of Newman’s poem roughly ...”

“... hired him to report on politics in Western Europe (driving a Bentley with his friend Robert Blake) and then in Czechoslovakia (a Lagonda with the young Alan Clark). In Tuscany, on the first of these jaunts, he met Bernard Berenson, art collector and maestro of highly paid authentication. Berenson became an intimate friend, and their correspondence over ...”