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“... I sometimes lie in the darkness Glad there is nothing I can see To blot the pictures in my memory: Sunlight in a fallen tree Where I hung on the wilting branches; Woodlarks circling in the sky Or folding like a bell into the heather; Blue light hardening to die Out of which there hurry faces, Lips, smiles, a sudden frown, A body white in the bracken, Raindrops where the leaves lay brown, Water, pavements, water, A fence where the starlings preen – I compel them through my memory, Never asking what else might have been ...”

“... Kool-Aid had been poured, darkened perceptibly’. That the artist’s wholly conscious intention may well be realised in a passage like this doesn’t matter in the least: we still wince, finding the repellent cuteness quite untransmuted. Though Jeffrey’s solemn pedantry is the source of much of this excess, it also contributes moments of startling ...”

“... but a history of nothing – well, that is science. The same can be said, multipliedly, of Derwent May’s book, which is essentially a history of the book review, a genre of such tiny dignity that its life might better be left unexamined. Over large portions, this book is about nothing – or, nothing more than the weekly phut-phut of the English ...”

“... courtesan, is hauled before a Dutch colonial court, so that her daughter and her wealth may be taken from her. All subtleties of language are reduced to the plain, prurient coarseness of the law-courts and the press. ‘She was not allowed to use Dutch and ordered to use Javanese. She refused and used Malay.’ When the case is resumed, after an ...”

“... proclaim ‘Power to the people’ in making usage the only criterion of whether something may be said, there is then for them an immediate opening-up of rich new possibilities of authority and authoritarianism. For who is to tell the people how the people are (is?) using their (its?) immense language except the indispensable new class of panoptic ...”

“... Derby City Council​ ’s offices sit on the River Derwent, a stone’s throw from the site of Lombe’s Mill, built in 1721, which claims to be the first fully mechanised factory in the world. In his Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, Daniel Defoe called it a ‘curiosity of a very extraordinary nature … the engine contains 26,586 wheels and 97,746 movements, which work 73,726 yards of silk-thread every time the water-wheel goes round, which is three times in one minute, and 318,504,960 yards in one day and night ...”

“... healthy place – morally or physically. If the whores didn’t get you, infections did – which may explain why it gained so many hospitals in the mid-19th century. In 1854, Dr John Snow advanced the cause of public health – and epidemiology – by persuading the local Board of Guardians to remove the handle from the Broad Street (now Broadwick ...”

“... their infant eyelids and steeped their infant souls in blessed forgetfulness.’ The sympathy may be accepted, but in no way can the words be taken as a ‘voice’ from the past, for they can never have been spoken. Liz Lochhead on lodging with relatives has the rhythms of spoken speech. It is not the village Hampdens of Scottish life that we need from ...”

“... has it that the announcement was removed only twenty minutes before the issue went to press.That may be as close to death as the TLS has ever come, but it has continued to have its ups and downs. Circulation rose through the 1920s to 30,000, then dropped sharply, down to 23,000 by 1934, and Richmond despaired of arresting the decline: ‘Even among my own ...”

“... skilled, are committed to chronology, but Gill’s reduction of his chapter titles to bare dates may indicate the fragile significance that Wordsworth himself attached to dates as such. Where Lamb considered that the chronological was the only possible arrangement for a collection of poems, since the order in which they were written constituted the history ...”

“... Duke of York for Nova Scotia, and notes how the wetland techniques necessary near the Yorkshire Derwent served them well in the marshlands of the Bay of Fundy. He makes mistakes, particularly on the Scottish setting. He is one of many historians who have obviously never been there, who insist on describing Caithness as highland, and indeed he specifically ...”

“... Holmes observes, in the present volume especially, seem to be as follows. Coleridge’s poetry may be quoted where it appears to throw light on his private life. His prose writings may be discussed only so long as that discussion does not interrupt or retard the narrative: so long, that is, as the writing of a work can ...”

“... Hardly had ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ been published than its author announced (in May 1799) his intention ‘to dedicate in silence the prime of my life’ to metaphysics, a turn made necessary, as he said a year later, by his sense that his ‘faculties’ were ‘dwindling’, or at least that they would not bear comparison with ...”

“... opinions and rather narrow tastes. Nonetheless he was very good at teaching one how to write. He may have been wrong in some of his literary judgments and ignorant in some areas of literature but he was good at getting rid of what was superfluous or phoney in a piece of writing. And he would be very insulting if one came out with some bit of ...”

“... company of a Tory MP. The arriving train was heavily congested and the unaccustomed Tory – who may or may not have been Alan Clark – recoiled from the throng revealed by the opening doors, suggesting that they might do better to walk along the platform to the restaurant car. Jeffrey Archer ...”