“... been confirmed by the formation of the Royal Shakespeare Company – a title of which it has been said that ‘it’s got everything in it except God.’ And indeed the many resemblances between Shakespeare and God have become commonplaces since the Romantic era. In practice, of course, the idea of his transcendence tends to reinforce conservative political ...”

“... of a mind coming to terms with itself. For Vendler, it appears, structure reminds us that what is said has been overseen, that thought has enjoyed reflection. Certainly, many of her chosen texts present reflective selves coherently coping with loss. It cannot simply be the tendency of American poets to drop dead in taxis, jump off bridges and gas themselves ...”

“... most playful. But the presence of the Great Modernists feels as remote and irrelevant as that of Edward Marsh’s Georgians.Larkin, the lonely fugitive from poetic Modernism, now looks suspiciously like a one-man tradition. So standard an item in recent collections has the Philip Larkin Memorial Poem become that it now exists as a genre in its own ...”

“... there are a few from 1734-35, nothing from 1736. By 1738, Johnson is writing fairly frequently to Edward Cave, on business connected with the Gentleman’s Magazine. In the 1740s he is launched – from our point of view – as a letter-writer, with a circle of friends and acquaintances sufficient to elicit sequences of correspondence. The Johnson of ...”

“... to portraiture. A lovely painting by Joshua Reynolds, probably from the late 1760s, is often said to be a portrait of Barber. It shows a fine-featured, rather dreamy-looking young man in three-quarters profile, with a high forehead and finely curled black hair somewhat receding at the temples. If this is a portrait of him, it is in at least one respect ...”

“... Cohn-Bendit, now a Green MEP, characterised the group in strikingly different language: he said it represented ‘the honour of Israel’. Two decades before Israel’s new historians debunked the country’s founding myths, Matzpen analysed Zionism as a unique form of settler-colonialism, based on the expulsion and displacement of the native ...”

“... it seeks to describe: one consequence of being ‘the first industrial nation’, it’s said, is that England has the proudest tradition of social criticism. We would do well, however, not to be too complacent about the merits of this kind of writing. After all, various interests, not all of them benign, can be served by portraying the present as a ...”

“... for his friend Arnaud, to whom he recommends the shirtmaker – the circle does close. Asked by Edward Hirsch, who interviewed him for the Paris Review, how he ‘hit upon’ his ‘distinctive, beautiful and implacable’ prose style, Salter answered tersely, almost evasively: ‘I like to write. I’m moved by writing. One can’t analyse it beyond ...”

“... and given custodial sentences; Lambert mysteriously walked away. Special Branch officers have said that Lambert must have acted alone; that even if the allegations are true, it is inconceivable that he had permission to do what he did. Under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act of 2000, covert policing requires advance authorisation from senior ...”

“... Rosa Klebb-like figure in a decaying Carlton House Terrace apartment. She asked me my politics; I said ‘Labour.’ ‘Not a Communist?’ ‘No.’ ‘Oh well, that’s all right then.’ So I passed that interview, and was scheduled for a second sometime later; but I withdrew when my postgraduate research grant came through. The extraordinary ...”

“... Margaret Tudor to James IV. ‘London thow art of Towynys A per se’, an anonymous poem, is said in one surviving manuscript copy to have been delivered at a dinner held by the Lord Mayor during the Christmas festivities that accompanied this visit, by ‘a Scottysh preyst sytting at oon of the syde tablys’. The poem is lavish in its praise of ...”

“... it would have demonstrated a photographic memory for his own past journalistic work. As Edward Sullivan, who 60 years ago first identified several dozen lengthy recyclings, put it: ‘If Maupassant did compose his book on the Bel-Ami in 1887, the yacht’s gear must have included a file of clippings of his old articles in the Gaulois and the ...”

“... solicitor and his mother a teacher of Latin and Greek. It was a household that valued learning and Edward and Mildred Ede were not so straitlaced as Jim was wont to suggest. They were, however, children of the 1860s. Jim liked to tell the story of the silver paper knife his father brought home on one occasion with a handle in the shape of a naked woman, and ...”

“... spirit’. Perhaps too medieval: Webb’s macabre wedding gift was a bedroom wardrobe decorated by Edward Burne-Jones with the blood libel story from Chaucer’s ‘Prioress’s Tale’. The Virgin Mary – modelled by Jane – tends to St Nicholas, who had his throat cut by the Jews before miraculously returning to life.Furnishing the Red House inspired ...”

“... career was ultimately stalled by the rise of unilateralism in the Labour Party, he can truly be said to have been hoist with his own petard. It is one of the appealing features of Healey’s memoirs that he still manifests the intellectual energy to engage in serious appraisal of political arguments at every level from abstract theoretical propositions to ...”