“... and textual constructions, the chest was ‘real’, as was its supposed original owner, William Canynge, a prosperous citizen of 15th-century Bristol. And the chest did contain early vellum documents, which Chatterton used to construct his fakes. The chest eventually became such a mythic object that even Dr Johnson heaved himself to the top of the ...”

“... human face. In the country, ‘The face of every neighbour whom I met/Was as a volume to me,’ Wordsworth recalled in The Prelude, but neighbours were harder to read in London: ‘The comers and goers face to face,/Face after face’. Blake’s Londoner can only ‘mark in every face I meet/Marks of weakness, marks of woe’. In The City of Dreadful ...”

“... Bare and Bald’, Coleridge enjoyed calling her in private, with more antipathy than inspiration. William McCarthy quotes the Table Talk anecdote early on in his compendious and admiring new biography of Barbauld, as though obliged to get it over with, and makes the suggestion that Barbauld had unwittingly revived Coleridge’s severe hang-ups about his ...”

“... His closest friend was the painter Henry Fuseli; his most notable protégés included Wordsworth and Mary Wollstonecraft. For decades, until Johnson’s death in 1809, they came in varying combinations to his weekly dinners, where the vitality of the conversation made up for the dullness of the menu, in which boiled fish and rice pudding loomed ...”

“... The many ‘modernisms’ of the 20th century found it much easier. In terms of style and genre, Wordsworth and Coleridge continued to rely on the 18th-century tradition of ballad and didactic poem, while Byron had successfully romanticised the more robust traditions of Dryden and Pope. Keats would read himself into style through a much more unstable and ...”

“... painting was the highest form of art. Today his only generally remembered work is a portrait of Wordsworth. In his lifetime Haydon was well-known and not without admirers but he was dogged increasingly by ridicule and failure. In 1846, after his designs for frescos in the Houses of Parliament had been rejected, he exhibited two of his massive historical ...”

“... seem to come into poets’ minds when they think of the sonnet. That’s probably true even of Wordsworth’s declaration that ‘Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room’ and that ‘’twas pastime to be bound/Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground.’ As Leigh Hunt drily noted in The Book of the Sonnet (1867), ‘thousands of nuns, there is ...”

“... Shelley is thus made present as a ‘supporting predecessor’ at a moment of fearful experience. Wordsworth is shown as bearing the same role in the stanza beginning, ‘The hills are shadows, and they flow ...’ And so in other places. While in the self-borrowings Tennyson is essentially stabilising an often torn and tormented mind by mustering evidences ...”

“... they were targets for demolition. At the beginning of the century Ruskin and his development by William Morris stood as a landmark in ideas about art and society. He was, as is so often reported, the writer most mentioned as an influence by the new Labour Members of Parliament. But by 1932, to take only one example, his social criticism was being ...”

“... work with the more personal and experimental genre of the fancy picture.In a letter to his friend William Jackson, written at the height of his career, Gainsborough complained that he was ‘sick of portraits’, but he seems, nonetheless, to have valued his fancy pictures – these were the works for which he charged the highest prices. And unlike portraits ...”

“... which was the essence of county society. Those drawn into it by friendship included Wordsworth, who first met James Losh when they took part in an inquiry into the mutiny on the Bounty in an attempt to exonerate Fletcher Christian, whom both men had known as a boy in Cockermouth. James, who became a Unitarian and a republican while at Cambridge ...”

“... of the past.’ That loss of innocence, and of meaning in nature, which is referred to in Wordsworth’s poetry had occurred at a national level. As the link between man and nature was broken, paradoxically people became more emotionally involved with particular animals, and more concerned with the rights of animals in general. Thus ‘a combination ...”

“... one hobbyhorse, almost conscientiously: the culture of Dissent. Hazlitt was born eight years after Wordsworth and 17 years before Keats, and Paulin would have us thank the philosophers of the ‘moral sense’ for the extent to which, in that enlightened age, facts and feelings went hand in hand once again as they did for the Elizabethans. Where did the energy ...”

“... mother was the great-granddaughter, not granddaughter of the Victorian physician Richard Bright; William Burroughs did not have access to ‘vast family wealth’. Callard does not appear to know that when Kavan fictionalised her second husband as ‘Oblomov’ she was referring to Goncharov’s terminally lazy hero. He is inconsistent about Kavan’s ...”

“... customer if Vauxhall offered more nightingales and fewer strumpets. A Virginian gentleman called William Byrd was matter of fact about the amenities in June 1718: We went to Spring Gardens where we picked up two women and carried them into the arbour and ate some cold veal and about 10 o’clock we carried them to the bagnio, where we bathed and lay with ...”