“... Not least the question of what the phrase ‘true friendship’ might mean both in its allusion to Blake – ‘Opposition is true friendship’ – and as a statement about the collaboration, or otherwise, between poets, and between poets and critics. The opposition alluded to by the title is sometimes Ricks’s real theme, though understandably it is the ...”

“... the circulation had fallen from 1.5m to 650,000 copies. After the print unions refused to discuss Robert Maxwell’s offer for the paper, Murdoch stepped in. ‘I am constantly amazed at the ease with which I entered British newspapers,’ he later said. Stick it up your punter! tells that story, and the story of what happened afterwards: a story which social ...”

“... one might use ‘Augustan’ to refer to Swift, Pope or Fielding and not to Defoe, Richardson or Blake) without claiming to force every individual case into a tight and elaborate fit. For him ‘Neo-Classicism’ means the rules codified by Renaissance pedagogues, the Horatian injunction to instruct and to please, and a few other things which are either ...”

“... the war was far from heroic, Barker borrowed the proper visionary accents, seeing the ghosts of Blake and others, crying out from the past. Alone on the dark beach I stood. The teeth of the seas tore the shore. ‘O immensely sad land,’ I said, ‘where Only the ghosts are good.’ He had a point there. Auden was saying much the same, and with the same ...”

“... other than human life”.’ He takes the phrase ‘something other than human life’ from Blake, who was referring to the Houses of Parliament, and not just to their or anyone else’s thought: ‘they seem to me,’ Blake wrote, ‘to be something else besides human life.’ The Magi are our frozen thoughts, our ...”

“... book with its shining flashes of metaphysics, its linguistic imprecision, its mass of references (Blake, Kierkegaard, Shakespeare, Giorgione, Walter Benjamin, and more, and more) how deeply psychoanalysis is concerned with culture. Not only broadly, with culture as opposed to nature, but with culture in its narrowest sense – that is, high bourgeois ...”

“... momentous realm of history.’ Northrop Frye regards the Bible as fiction because, like William Blake, from whom he derives his title, he comes near to identifying religion with creativity. To that extent he is an ally of Alter: but to him the focus of creativity is not in narrative but in myth; and myth is a construct – ‘it belongs to the world of ...”

“... and down Carnaby Street; fashion-following funkateers in London clubland in 1982 are celebrated in Robert Elms’s grand explication of a scene that amounted to no more than a bunch of people wandering around with no socks, espadrilles and holes torn in the knees of their jeans. Most ludicrous Londonism of all is a 1972 claim about George Best: ‘Though he ...”

“... meanness, and if mentally thick, nonetheless a durable and somehow a reassuring presence.William Blake’s​ parents, like Gillray’s, belonged to the Moravian Church, and their early careers ran parallel in other ways. Blake’s first book, Poetical Sketches, came out in 1783, the same year as Gillray’s first major ...”

“... homosexual rape carried out by an older man – specifically, a domineering uncle-guardian named Robert Manning, whose bed and board were shared by the fledgling author before he left for Bowdoin College. (Manning also happened to be, for those who might want to make something of it, the most renowned pomologist in the United States.) For ...”

“... are Laurence Lerner, Cedric Watts, Roger Scruton, John Holloway, Gabriel Josipovici, Wayne Booth, Robert Pattison and Anthony Thorlby. Four of them teach at Sussex, so I suppose the book started as a bright idea in the Senior Common Room at Falmer. Some of the essays are genial performances. Josipovici obviously likes Barthes’s work, and writes happily of ...”

“... of dancing. Altogether the choruses are less richly rendered than they are in the translation by Robert Fagles, but the austerity is deliberate and this whole work is very cool and restrained. It results from an independent approach to Sophocles, and the introduction offers a personal reading of the plays which is both interesting and quite unlike the way ...”

“... as a Neo-Romantic painter, part of the postwar reawakening of the national landscape tradition of Blake and Palmer. In 1987 an influential exhibition at the Barbican, A Paradise Lost: The Neo-Romantic Imagination in Britain 1935-55, reinforced the categorisation for another generation. Yet of the five artists in the conventional Neo-Romantic grouping, Craxton ...”

“... North & South (1946), and a Pulitzer Prize in 1956 for her second, A Cold Spring. Writing to Robert Lowell in 1958, she confesses to feeling ‘green with envy’ over Lowell’s ‘kind of assurance’ in the poems of Life Studies, and adds that ‘it is hell to realise one has wasted half one’s talent through timidity.’ Bishop’s ‘timidity’ is ...”

“... Little Review, serialised the novel.) Bryher financially supported her lover H.D. and her husband Robert McAlmon, who published Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes and Ernest Hemingway. There is also the suggestion, never quite substantiated by Souhami, that the way these women lived, their promiscuity and outsized influence, could itself be considered uniquely ...”