“... Thee’ and much that France still offers. There are writers he likes, most of them dead: Ronsard, John Clare, William Barnes (‘love of whose poems seems to me a litmus paper of the genuine’), Auden (‘the greatest of my contemporaries’), George Herbert, Vaughan, Crabbe, Hopkins, Whitman, Campion, Morris, Christina Rossetti, ...”

“... when they have been the intimidated colleagues of the late F.R. Leavis. ‘Unashamedly,’ says John Rathmell of Christ’s College, ‘a lyric and romantic poet in the tradition of Blake and Shelley’, thus grossly maligning both Blake and Shelley. (‘Unashamedly’, however, is correct.) Either the Times or the Telegraph had advance knowledge of the ...”

“... and yet falling short of the ideal moral imperatives? These are the questions which occupy John Dunn in the essays that make up this book and which give it a coherence greater than that usually achieved in such collections. They range from reflections on and exercises in the history of ideas, through detailed case-studies of African and Asian political ...”

“... its strange and extreme silentness’. Coleridge wrote this line in 1798, a couple of years before John Marsh finished the first part of his History of My Private Life, and a reading of ‘Frost at Midnight’, along with some of the other ‘Conversation Poems’ – ‘The Aeolian Harp’, ‘This Lime-tree Bower My Prison’, ‘The Nightingale’, for ...”

“... The relationship between Byron and his editor John Murray lasted a little over ten years. It began in March 1812 with the publication of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which made Byron’s name. (‘I awoke one morning and found myself famous,’ he famously wrote, or is said to have written.) It ended twice: first, in the winter of 1822, when, after a number of disagreements and misunderstandings, Byron transferred his business to the publisher John Hunt; and finally in the spring of 1824, when Murray presided over the destruction of Byron’s memoirs, which he had not read, in his rooms at 50 Albemarle Street ...”

“... pleasant opportunity to tell people twice their age what to do. At the time when the undergraduate John Henry Newman was delighting in the inexhaustible metaphorical riches of Aeschylus at Oxford, the students of Maynooth were being fed a philistine diet of papist apologetics and garbled chunks of scholasticism. It was well nigh impossible, given this dismal ...”

“... falling away. The Sunday Telegraph has ceased its passionate flirtations with nostalgia. Besides, John Major is either dismantling some of what she did or failing to conceal his embarrassment at the consequences of what he cannot undo. In the balance between exalting the Thatcher years and distancing itself from them, the Major Government has slowly but ...”

“... more than seventy years in this hard world, comes before it as an optimist? The handsome head of John Redcliffe-Maud, alias Sir John Maud, GCB, CBE and what else, alias Baron of the City and County of Bristol, looks from the dust-cover with a questioning half-smile. In his Bath robes? Not a bath-robe, anyway, though it ...”

“... and things like that. I like first-person music.’ We didn’t enjoy hearing this in 1970, when John Lennon said it in the course of Jann Wenner’s ‘Rolling Stone’ Interviews. It was bad enough that Lennon had left the beloved Beatles to work with a Japanese-born conceptual artist, living in beds and bags and producing minimalist packages of ...”

“... The dust jacket of the final volume of Bevis Hillier’s epic life of John Betjeman shows the poet laureate seized by giggles. In this lengthy coda to Hillier’s authorised biography Betjeman appears in many lights, but he’s rarely carefree. ‘Nothing frightens me more than the thought of dying,’ he told a friend in 1958 ...”

“... with the elderly gentleman beside me. He had a lot to say about herbaceous borders. He was John Profumo. But I didn’t know it was him until the end: helping him on with his coat, I saw a little nametag. He liked talking to Denis and they seemed to have things in common.We can now say a bit more about that, thanks to the third volume of Charles ...”

“... thinks of his montages as sentences. The impression is that each work says one thing and one only. John Berger wrote of Kennard: ‘I would say his work was pure – if the word hadn’t become dirty.’Archive of Dissent, an exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery (until 19 January), complicates the idea of Kennard’s work as univocal and determined. As a ...”

“... English housing and town planning. In other English buildings the influence is direct. Colin St John Wilson was a friend and admirer. Sources for the steep roofs, the vertical accent (the clock tower), the plain brick walls, wave-profiles in entrance hall ceilings and the careful modulation of light in the reading rooms of his British Library can be found ...”

“... concerned with South African politics. It has no evident connection with the Coetzee figure (‘John’ in the text), who is described as sharing a house with his father and spending most of his time not very usefully on repairing it. Certain passages italicised in the text are said by the biographer to be memoranda by Coetzee ‘himself’, perhaps as ...”

“... after for just long enough. You have probably never heard of Anthony Scoloker, or Ursyn Mylner, or John Gybkin or Lodowick Harbard, but Blayney reveals probably as much as it is humanly possible to know of their teeming world. When John Warwick died in York in 1542, his inventory listed not only one cow and six silver ...”