“... the banks of the River Loddon with views across the valley, from the 12th century until 1531, when Henry VIII granted William Paulet a licence to rebuild. A feudal castle evolved into a stately home fit for royalty, said to be ‘the greatest of any subject’s house in England’. Its nickname, Loyalty House – after the marquess of Winchester’s motto ...”

“... well-known cultural figures who had been his friends (Dylan Thomas, George Orwell, Eric Gill and John Middleton Murry), evoking them first separately and then in some slightly dizzying comparisons: I had seen Murry working, happily absorbed and with real skill, mending fences, sawing up logs (once, too absorbed), laying down barrels of Sauerkraut, cutting ...”

“... Brooke in profile (‘your favourite actress’, some of his friends labelled it). He was, Henry James wrote, ‘in an extraordinary degree … a creature on whom the gods had smiled their brightest’ (James had fallen hard for what Brooke called ‘his fresh, boyish stunt’).In 1918 his Collected Poems were finally published, together with a memoir ...”

“... of exquisite perfection. In it lies Sir William Wilcote, MP for Oxfordshire under Richard II and Henry IV, who died in 1411. He is shown in alabaster armour, with a collar of SS (the Lancastrian badge), his eagle coat of arms on his jupon and a chaplet round his helm. Beside him his wife with a rich head-dress. A noble tomb. His son ...”

“... seemed to me quite like what you’re up to.GP: Did you ever come across another Peckham artist, John Latham?TP: Of course, of course, I know him well. Knew him well.GP: Did you talk to him much about books?TP: Like most artists I meet, we talked about money, women, publishers, things that are wrong in the world, the Royal Academy.GP: But he never belonged ...”

“... of its offices: ‘At this location, 122 Commerce Street, was a very large warehouse owned by John Murphey, who provided support to the slave traders in the city.’ ‘I would have preferred not to have the additional markers,’ the mayor confessed, ‘but I believe they are part of history.’ He agreed to allow them, he said, because they would ...”

“... heir to the great tradition of Dublin Protestant oratory which passes from Burke and Sheridan to Henry Grattan. Like his compatriot Charles Stewart Parnell, he took this reformist rhetoric into the highways and byways, as a street-corner speaker. There was nothing of the armchair socialist about him: he spent six years as a district councillor, serving on a ...”

“... 1952 production of The Petrified Forest – with Humphrey Bogart repeating his classic 1936 role, Henry Fonda doing Leslie Howard, and Lauren Bacall as Bette Davis. The show went well. Bogart, always a bit of a snob, and once chucked out of Andover, was impressed that Dunne had been to Williams College. He invited the nobody kid to a party at his home in the ...”

“... us sample questions from past papers. Wondering how Wordsworth and his undergraduate friend Robert Jones managed to miss their way at the Simplon Pass, as recorded in The Prelude, he walks the route and explains the topography. Later, to elucidate the account of ascending Snowdon in Book xiii of the poem, he puts on his boots again and pants up the poet’s ...”

“... sunrise at Stonehenge. How was that image created? The Stonehenge connection goes back to John Aubrey, who first recognised the monuments at Avebury in 1649 and then spent nearly fifty years writing and talking about, but never quite finishing, his projected Templa Druidum. He was followed by William Stukeley, Anglican clergyman and ‘pagan ...”

“... exactly in the little they said that Alma read the much that was there.’ The result is closer to Henry James than to Genet.Snyder makes no reference to Purdy’s close contemporary John Horne Burns, whose 1947 novel, The Gallery, had negotiated a sure-footed path through the competing claims of directness and prudence (it ...”

“... implications of Blake’s debt to Macpherson’s Ossian. Of Williams’s first trio of writers, John Barrell, on the period 1730-1780, applies theory to practice most fully and intelligently. Barrell’s ‘Equal, Wide Survey’ deals with topics associated with Williams – pastoral poetry and language – but handles them in an unabashed scholarly ...”

“... with ‘O little town of Bethlehem’ (Phillips Brooks) and ‘Dear Lord and Father of mankind’ (John Greenleaf Whittier) as runners-up. Among the works of the canonical English poets, the lines known to most people are probably those beginning Blake’s Milton, ‘And did those feet in ancient time ...’, which Parry set to music and turned into the hymn ...”

“... If they’ve arrived too late, they should have gone in earlier.The Orton material is drawn from John Lahr’s biography, Prick Up Your Ears, which plays the part in Corey Fah Does Social Mobility that The Trial did in Sterling Karat Gold – a text to be ‘put to work’, in Waidner’s phrase. Orton’s literary executor was his agent, Peggy Ramsay. She ...”

“... Loach and Leigh, Powell and Pressburger, Lean and Reed, the Boultings and Woodfall (although Tom Jones does get a long and interesting discussion here). Or at least, that’s the way this book might have been seen fifteen years ago. Now, in fact, many of the works he writes about have been canonised, none more so than the ‘unholy trinity’ of folk horror ...”