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“... cadences of Hopkins and Christina Rossetti over upper-class dialects and iambic regularities. Like Donne, he is proud to be harsh. He won’t tell the reader what is meant by a ‘boortree’ or a ‘cuas’, equally unknown to me and the OED. You could probably guess from the context that ‘stocious’ is Irish for ‘drunk’ but even an Irishman I ...”

“... sheer bulk of the volumes, the acknowledgment in the titles of a sequential arrangement – From Donne to Marvell, From Dryden to Johnson – makes nonsense of the claim to rigour. Penguin say they are reissuing the series because it sold and continued to sell, and a quarter of a century ago this was understandable. Then the Guide might have promised to have ...”

“... Twenty-one years ago, in The Characters of Love, John Bayley suggested that ‘there is a sense in which the highest compliment we can pay to Shakespeare is to discuss his great plays as if they were also great novels.’ At that time, Othello seemed to him particularly (indeed uniquely) responsive to such treatment ...”

“... John Evelyn was a dry old stick – and here that metaphor has an almost literal force, since his first and greatest love was for trees. In Fumifugium (1661) he argued that smoky workshops should be banished from London, and that the environs of the city should be planted with ‘such Shrubs, as yield the most fragrant and odoriferous Flowers’ to sweeten its stench ...”

“... England (S.T. Bindoff, 1950), England Under the Tudors (G.R. Elton, 1955), Tudor England again (John Guy, 1988), branding the age – see J.A. Williamson’s The Tudor Age (1953) – with the logo of the double rose of the dynasty which, conveniently, coincided with a generous 16th century of 118 years, 1485 to 1603. It is a good question how we would have ...”

“... Watson calls attention to the statement, in the biography of the politician by Namier and John Brooke, that Townshend needed his wit to shield a poverty of heart. This might be held to be like Lovelace, and in each case the wit is very brilliant. Each is a paragon in this respect. And Townshend was also known for his easy success with women. In ...”

“... thought and elsewhere better expressed. His erotic lyrics and insect poems make a reader long for Donne or Herrick; his Pindaric odes for Cowley or Dryden; his gothic meditation ‘The Dream’ for Il Penseroso or Parnell’s ‘A Night-piece on Death’; his mock diatribe ‘To a Lady who put herself into a bad way, by taking Spirit of Nitre, by ...”

“... she was one of four English writers selected: Shakespeare did not make the cut. And then there are John Shepery, Professor of Hebrew at Oxford, who had the brilliant idea of a poem by a man responding to female accusations from the Heroides; Sir Thomas Chaloner, ambassador to Spain, who wrote a ten-book poem on statecraft dedicated to Lord Burghley, De ...”

“... can be traced directly to this milieu, in fact directly to a single poem, published by Sir John Hoskyns (a former terrae filius at Oxford and author of mock-orations at the Middle Temple, where he was ‘Clerk of the Council to the Prince d’Amour’ for Christmas 1597). This is the set of ‘Cabalistical Verses’ prefaced to Thomas Coryate’s ...”

“... taken. Then the Troubles flared up again; and the IRA bombing campaign came to the mainland; and John McGrath wrote The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil; and suddenly it was 1974, and there were two close-run general elections, and not only did the Ulster Unionists matter even in England, but so did a couple of hitherto obscure and eccentric ...”

“... simple identification of the praiser of Shakespeare, upon whose words the whole dedication turns: John Webster, in the note ‘To the Reader’ before The White Devil. Browning’s Elizabethanised play has its affinities with Webster: moreover, it was canny of him to emend Webster’s prefatory words so as to reduce them to a single-minded praise of ...”

“... where he encountered modern art in the form of pictures by Gauguin, Wilson Steer, Augustus John, William Nicholson, and woodcuts by Kandinsky, collected by the University’s Vice-Chancellor. Frank Rutter, curator of Leeds Art Gallery, completed the boy’s artistic education. He had already begun to write poems, in free verse influenced by ...”

“... early poems, sometimes converting them to an inappropriate modern harshness; nobody seems to like John Crowe Ransom’s reworkings; and Auden’s revisions and exclusions sometimes seem petulant or even perverse, as if he had decided not to understand his own poems. Since the original versions remain accessible this is not a matter of high ...”

“... must be partly the help more recently given by such learned work on the art of inscriptions as John Sparrow’s, whose Visible Words, Line upon Line and Lapidaria are gratefully quoted in this and the following paragraph. For some three hundred years after the mid-15th century, a new art born in Italy swept Europe, accompanying the greater visual ...”

“... folklore, is no less significant. Disturbingly, to an East Coast Brahmin, Shakespeare, Donne, Webster, Tourneur (and sometimes Middleton) seem to have a depth, an extra dimension, which Jonson’s work lacks. ‘Their words have often a network of tentacular roots reaching down to the deepest terrors and desires. Jonson’s most certainly have ...”