“... also destroyed his diaries at the end of every year. One diary – that for 1867 – was lost or, more likely, stolen in America. It resurfaced in 1943. ‘Since then,’ as Claire Tomalin puts it, ‘scholars have been squeezing it like a tiny sponge for every drop of information it can yield.’ Scholars justify their curiosity on the grounds that anything ...”

“... from Black Mountain and Objectivism to Yvor Winters and the ‘plain style’. In Britain he is more likely to be known as a deviant Movement figure, author of such books as Purity of Diction in English Verse and Articulate Energy, and as a poet who, while initially espousing Movement plainness, refused to meet his readers halfway (halfway was already too ...”

“... book on Some Religious Elements in English Literature and a biography of Milton. Like her ancestor Thomas Babington Macaulay, whose History of England was intended to appeal to the common reader (and particularly to women), she disliked intellectual snobbery. In ‘Parties’ she surveys the foibles of the literary world represented at a gathering: the ...”

“... of verse tales told by the passengers on a transatlantic steamer, Mari Magno; and a welter of more or less polished lyrics. But the mythology of failure persisted and Clough found himself transmitted to posterity as a minor moon in Arnold’s orbit, a useful illustration of everything his friend thought amiss with modernity – its absence of heroic ...”

“... troops to Basingstoke. This had been the first major assault on Basing House, but there would be more.The site of the Tudor palace had been a locus of human activity and power since the Stone Age. A timber fortress stood there, on the banks of the River Loddon with views across the valley, from the 12th century until 1531, when Henry VIII granted William ...”

“... year or so tossing a new stumbling-block into the path of those who would like to understand them. Thomas Hardy was England’s worst offender in this regard: but Graham Greene, now 80, bids fair to give Hardy a run for his money. Not in quality, of course. Even Greene’s most enthusiastic advocates wouldn’t attempt to place him in the top rank of English ...”

“... many voices. Much like his Canterbury pilgrims, he is always en route but never arriving. We have more contemporary documents that mention Chaucer than any other premodern poet: 493 of them, meticulously compiled by Martin Crow and Clair Olson in Chaucer Life Records (1966). What they record is the career of a competent civil servant. A member of the king’s ...”

“... or out-of-doors)’; on Ed Dorn’s magical misspellings, which are sometimes ‘exhuberant’ and more often ‘queezy’, but which can pack a portmanteau which is worth the carriage, as in ‘The creatures of ice feignt and advance’ (or the truest poetry is the most feigning); on Robert Lowell’s achieving what is rare in him, a telling sequence, in his ...”

“... Parts I and II of the total scheme, and a substantial portion of Part III. Musil later gave 20 more chapters of Part III to the printers and revised them in galleys but then withdrew them. Burton Pike, an eminent Musil scholar and the translator of this material into English, nicely says these chapters ‘were intended to continue’ Part III ‘but not ...”

“... It all contributes to the image of a local artist painting agreeable scenes. Those who have looked more closely at his work have seen more in it, but disagree about what the more is. Roger Fry admired the energy of the sketches, the aspect of Constable that flatters posterity by seeming to ...”

“... epidemics because, even in the short run, endemic illnesses kill, disable and make wretched many more human beings than the more spectacular epidemics with their abundance of bizarre incidents and accessible evidence. Rather than merely recount the course of an epidemic, the new historians try to encompass the ...”

“... happen next. Although the overt narrative proper to illustration will eventually be replaced by more enigmatic evocations of place, Hopper would go on making you wonder what has happened – or will happen. They are among the best prints made in the 20th century. Edward Hopper, ‘Night on the El Train’ (1918) The Hopper etchings are a late instance ...”

“... centuries was also brisk. Some transformations teetered on the brink before falling back. John Thomas Smith’s 1680 plan of Whitehall Palace shows a confused warren of a building; only the ‘modern’ Banqueting House stands broad, thick-walled and symmetrical. This could have been the ‘before’ for a spectacular ‘after’, adumbrated by a view ...”

“... formed monuments – a single sonnet or 28-line poem from the officer class – that are perhaps more stirring and certainly more accessible. Jones, like Ivor Gurney and Isaac Rosenberg, was not an officer, even though he was offered the chance in the spring of 1916. He said he didn’t think he was ‘that sort of ...”

“... Camus and Sartre. Walser, drawn to balloon rides and flights of fancy, pretended to no such heft; Thomas Mann referred to him as a ‘clever child’. When Sontag situated Walser as ‘the missing link between Kleist and Kafka’, however, she was gesturing towards an outlaw tradition running alongside, and frequently in resistance to, the ...”