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“... At first Dickens tried to deny that Harold Skimpole, the parasitical aesthete of Bleak House, had been based on his friend Leigh Hunt; but later he confessed, not a little proudly, that the character was ‘the most exact portrait that was ever painted in words . . . it is an absolute reproduction of a real man.’ Skimpole is a corrosive presence in the novel, a serene-faced sponger who claims to know nothing of ‘the world ...”

“... he cried, and flung himself vigorously, violently down onto Mrs Filmer’s area railings.’ Gregory Dart’s Metropolitan Art and Literature, 1810-40: Cockney Adventures charts, not the consolidation of a district, but the restless motion of a figure. London becomes the place where it’s difficult to know one’s place. In the relatively short ...”

“... makes, whether to friends or to those he does not know at all personally. In a brilliant insight Gregory Dart has pointed out how much Godwin resembled Robespierre, both of them committed to an ethics of perfect transparency. Letters to Joseph Gerrald, on trial for sedition in Edinburgh at the start of 1794, and to John Thelwall, on trial at the end of ...”

“... veering off uneasily into the tones of Alexander Pope (‘And I – a victim to love’s cruel dart,/Went – to the Opera – with a broken heart!’) – in this case, the satirical invasion saves the poem from drowning in its own reserves of treacle. As soon as the lad wakes up we are shown that he does have some of the attributes of a real ...”

“... the celebrities who have made their homes, or pitched their weekend cottages, within sight of the Dart. His list climbs, in order of precedence, through the ranks of the famous and infamous, the recently notorious and the hopefully forgotten: an inflation of Dimblebys, a lobotomy of Heavy Metal percussionists, Daphne du Maurier, Dame Agatha Christie ...”

“... made him hard to place, and his social ambiguity became for his critics (some themselves what Gregory Dart in Metropolitan Art and Literature 1810-40: Cockney Adventures called ‘social amphibians’) a matter of derision. His parents managed a thriving London hostelry and inn, the Swan and Hoop, near Bedlam Hospital in Moorfields. In his 1963 ...”

“... form. ‘19 October’ is a dignified and elegiac coterie poem, inviting comparison with Yeats’s Gregory elegy, though the poet’s separation from his friends is due to his exile at Mikhailovskoye and not mainly, as in Yeats, to their death. Thomas uses a stanza in some respects reminiscent of Yeats’s, more subdued in tone and more sparing of proud ...”

“... both she and her work were largely forgotten. (According to one legend, the Christian patriarch Gregory of Nazianzos, offended by the licentiousness of her subject-matter, put her books to the torch in 380 AD.) Neither Dante nor Chaucer refers to her. Only with the recovery and translation of certain ancient texts in the Renaissance – Longinus’ On the ...”