“... not an easy thing to have on your conscience that you were personally responsible for putting Robert Mugabe in power but Wilfred Mhanda has had to live with that knowledge for the last 24 years. You might think the last year, which has seen 32 murders, countless cases of rape, torture, arson and beating, all to help Mugabe steal an election, would have ...”

“... measurable distance of the end of my tether’ combines distress with elegance. Writing to Herbert Read he says: ‘I have been of late exceptionally busy and exceptionally worried, even for me.’ And writing again to his brother he says his life is such a mess that it would make him laugh, ‘if any Eliot could ever laugh’. He likes this one so ...”

“... Tractatus, itself a notoriously obscure work, are some of the clearest parts of Kevin Scharp and Robert Brandom’s collection. It is his expositions of his own ideas which are often so hard to follow. Other things contribute to Sellars’s relative invisibility in the broader intellectual landscape. He was an academic philosopher through and through: his ...”

“... unusual layout and typography, and for his close association with older poets, especially with Robert Lowell (he co-edited Lowell’s posthumous Collected Poems). Bidart and his poems indeed have all these qualities, but they are not the best reasons to read his poetry. That poetry – especially in his last few books – deserves to be known for the ...”

“... be one of the latter. But he has a wonderful ear for voice in unfamiliar and little-known poems by Herbert, Graves, Christina Rossetti, Kenneth Ashley, and he opens with a marvellous one – surely his own discovery – by the Medieval chronicler John Lydgate, about a horse called Lyarde, too old now to work. They lead him to the smithy to pull off his shoon ...”

“... magnificent love-compliment, ‘Two Ways of It’, a poem which, in the manner of some of George Herbert, even as it denounces the hyperbolical achieves it. Such a sophisticated manoeuvre is highly rhetorical in a way not allowed for by Crozier when he denounces Larkin and Hughes and Heaney ‘as rhetoricians, in fact’. 1960 was late for such ...”

“... it. Or at least that is the idea. In his poem ‘Apollo and Marsyas’ the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert imagines a new sort of howl which might come out of that musical contest. The tone is cool, a little sceptical and very Polish, well aware of the nature of experiences which art can or maybe cannot encompass. At any rate, the kind of art that knows it is ...”

“... revolution of its own? In a controversial book, George III, Lord North and the People (1949), Herbert Butterfield argued that this moment came a decade before the French Revolution, in 1779-80. These years witnessed a movement for parliamentary reform and a popular clamour against Catholic relief, which culminated in the Gordon Riots, the largest popular ...”

“... that lurked behind political rhetoric, or ‘flapdoodle’ as he called it. Cowling’s mentor, Herbert Butterfield, was Namier’s fiercest critic. In George III and the Historians (1957), Butterfield punctured Namierite reductiveness: ‘Human beings are the carriers of ideas as well as the repositories of vested interests.’ Although Cowling believed ...”

“... another group of rebels dragged the archbishop of Canterbury, Simon of Sudbury, and the treasurer, Robert Hales, out of the Tower of London and beheaded them on Tower Hill. On 15 June the rebels and the king met again, this time at Smithfield. Their leader, Wat Tyler, failed to doff his cap, instead taking the king’s arm and shaking it roughly in ...”

“... should be, that influence has occasioned remarkably little anxiety in the younger poets, such as Robert Crawford, Liz Lochead, W.N. Herbert, Kathleen Jamie and Jackie Kay, who have learned from him. In Edwin Morgan: Inventions of Modernity, Colin Nicholson tries to account for his many-sided subject by examining him facet ...”

“... self-interested – rather than statesmanlike – motivations of 18th-century politicians, while Herbert Butterfield pointed out the present-minded distortions of the past found in grand constitutional narratives. Later, K.B. McFarlane applied Namier’s insights to the 15th century, diverting attention from the constitution to the political elite and the ...”

“... Morris scholar John Drinkwater, as though to oppose it would be derisive of the common mood. Robert Byron, less precious than usual, regretted that ‘according to official and ecclesiastical standards … a bit of the old Roman wall is of more importance than Nash’s Regent Street, and one ruined pointed arch than all Wren’s churches put ...”

“... than others, however much we may protest that they are merely different? For instance, does Robert Lowell’s Life Studies intrigue us more than, say, Tony Harrison’s family reminiscences in Continuous? If so, is it because Lowell’s technique is more sophisticated and fluid than Harrison’s vigorously clanking sonnet sequence in which the rhymes ...”

“... representative of the Inner Voice in ‘The Function of Criticism’. Above all, he was papabile. Herbert Read remarked that ‘by the time he was given the Criterion Eliot was our undisputed leader.’ There is a good account of his complex early relationships with London writers in Erik Svarny’s The Men of 1914. One can hardly miss a certain ...”