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“... Harriet Guest’s starting-point is Donald Davie’s suggestion in 1958 that Christopher Smart might be considered ‘the greatest poet between Pope and Wordsworth’. Her intelligent and carefully argued book does not deliver quite the far-reaching reassessment of Smart’s status Davie must have had in mind. He wanted Smart to be judged over the whole range of his poetic output, both conventional and unconventional, ‘light and ribald as well as devotional, urbane or tender as well as sublime ...”

“... If John Bampfylde has any continuing public existence, it must be as the man on the right in this unusual double portrait by Joshua Reynolds. An interested enquirer might learn that Bampfylde was a minor poet of the later 18th century and, in the absence of much hard information, encounter what is scarcely more than a striking anecdote of frustrated love and subsequent insanity ...”

“... 18th-Century Verse and 18th-Century Women Poets, both edited with great skill and erudition by Roger Lonsdale, and Travel Verse, by Kevin Crossley-Holland. When I say ‘read them’ I mean I have dipped copiously, as one usually does with anthologies, sometimes taking years to digest the whole. They all addressed a finite but considerable field ...”

“... The publication of this anthology is an important event – as significant as the appearance of Roger Lonsdale’s earlier Oxford Book of 18th-Century Verse, that unmarmoreal volume. As our battle of the books is waged, and canons to the left and right volley and thunder, this dignified Fellow of Balliol has done more to change our view of the 18th century than many avowed canon-chargers with more ostensibly up-to-date artillery ...”

“... qualities of sense and sensibility the commemoratee would have relished. There is, for instance, Roger Lonsdale, presenting with due flourish a work by the painter and art theorist Jonathan Richardson the elder, and illuminating Richardson’s own little-known life (down to a new birth-year) as well as the career of his young friend Pope. ...”

“... vanquishes her pupil by giving him false, irresistible confidence in his own abilities. Roger Lonsdale identified a similar dynamic in Johnson’s sometimes disturbingly fierce reactions to the ‘seductive powers of eloquence’ and ‘overpowering pleasure’ of poetry. Documenting those responses while seeking to reframe them in general ...”

“... face of this severe judgment on Dr Burney’s part in his daughter’s story, that his biographer Roger Lonsdale saw Fanny Burney as the villainess in her father’s story. In Dr Charles Burney he accused her of conscious dishonesty and ruthless egoism in her Memoirs of her father, in which she was found guilty of having schemed – by ...”

“... marriage in ‘Modern Manners’, a poem first published in 1799 and reprinted recently by Roger Lonsdale in his Oxford anthology of Eighteenth Century Women Poets, she took for granted that the most direct route to separate property was to marry for money and chuck the husband. In ‘former times’, according to a speaker named ...”

“... to be formal, and I to be proud ...       Version in 18th-Century Women Poets, edited by Roger Lonsdale The chicken and champagne aspects of life, the playful and the erotic, pertain to the ‘private’ and not to the social existence. Women have to hide their erotic feelings, keeping them only for private life and unofficial intervals. It is ...”

“... a canonisation of him and a celebration of her own literary career. (‘Fanny’s last novel’, Roger Lonsdale called it in his biography of Charles Burney.) Yet she recovered and left to us a hoard of paper that makes Burney a biographer’s dream: the letters and journals that she lugged back and forth across the Channel, and which at present ...”

“... verse. Certainly the culture was one that, in theory, adored and admired poetry. No reader of Roger Lonsdale’s New Oxford Book of 18th-Century Verse – a collection too large and too rich to be more than mentioned here – can remain ignorant as to how far through Augustan society at large the passion for poetry spread. The major difference ...”