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“... of the best: in the morning, as Summerscale reports, ‘they talked about “great men” such as Samuel TaylorColeridge and George Combe.’ Later Edward read her a passage from an essay on the imagination by Shelley; after lunch (‘plucked pigeons laid on a bed of beef steak and baked in puff pastry’) they went ...”

“... violated and impeded.’ But even in his rural retreat he was besieged by vigilantes. His friend Coleridge, also a target of attention, denounced their persecutors as a modern-day plague of frogs: ‘little low animals with chilly blood and staring eyes, that come up into our houses and bed-chambers’. Britain had become a land of ‘imposture and ...”

“... John Taylor, the journalist, newspaper editor and poet, was born in 1757. His grandfather, the legendary ‘Chevalier’ Taylor, had been oculist to George II, and afterwards, so his grandson assures us, to ‘every crowned head in Europe’. He was as famous for his womanising as for his knowledge of ophthalmology, but most famous, perhaps, for his habit of prefacing every operation he performed with a long speech in praise of his own skill, composed in what he claimed was ‘the true Ciceronian’, with each main verb cunningly held back to the end of the sentence ...”

“... and thus more pleasingly. Compare: ‘On fait de son mieux pour faire ses devoirs soi-même.’Samuel TaylorColeridge, in the posthumously published Anima Poetae, argued that ‘it’ was the right pronoun for referring to indefinite nouns like ‘everyone’ or ‘the person’, ‘in order to avoid ...”

“... today. British music of the early 20th century is undergoing a reassessment – Ethel Smyth, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, John Ireland, Ivor Gurney and Rebecca Clarke are all gracing stages once again, and established historical narratives are being upended by new scholarship on their lives and works. Delius, in all ...”

“... union a common hankering after fame. No two figures in British literature – not Wordsworth and Coleridge, not Auden and Isherwood, not Holmes and Dr Watson either – so humanly combine a delight in the sweetmeats of being with the fears and rigours of moral enquiry. The friendship of these two was geological: the shifting plates of their characters, the ...”

“... is in the extracts from the destroyed notebooks. They suggest comparison with the notebooks of Coleridge, Thoreau, Hopkins or Chekhov in their quirky blend of observation and arresting generalisation. If the vogue for such journals had been established, Hardy might not have junked his, but it’s more likely that the Life was an escape-hatch for this ...”