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“... A bearded patriarch, possibly in Elizabethan dress, rests on his elbow, stretched out on a snug little hillock in the middle of a wedge-shaped field of corn. He is leaning against some sort of natural cushion, and it’s possible he is asleep, though he has a large book open in front of him so perhaps it’s just that his eyes are cast down to scrutinise its pages ...”

“... Among the many delights to be found in Roger Lonsdale’s New Oxford Book of 18th-Century Verse is a squib by Thomas Holcroft, provoked by some disparaging remarks Voltaire made about Shakespeare. In fact, Voltaire was perfectly ready to concede that Shakespeare was possessed of real genius, though of a rough and ready kind, but in denying that he had ‘so much as a Spark of good Taste, or knew one Rule of the Drama’, and other such remarks, he scandalised what Gibbon once described as the ‘idolatry for the Gigantic Genius of Shakespeare which is inculcated from our infancy as the first duty of an Englishman ...”

“... Romanticism​ bequeathed a good many things to the beleaguered modern imagination, one of the most provoking of which was the thought that it should get out more. That bit of advice proved all the more challenging because it contradicted the other basic idea which the Romantics left behind – namely, that what mattered was staying inside, wrapped in the private world of subjectivity and ‘mental space ...”

“... What​ became of his face? In his memorial address Stephen Spender, who had known Auden since they were undergraduates, contrasted the young man, Nordic and brilliant, with a ‘second image of Wystan … of course one with which you are all familiar: the famous poet with the face like a map of physical geography, criss-crossed and river-run and creased with lines ...”

“... You​ would be hard pressed to describe Geoffrey Hill’s final work. To say it is a sort of notebook cast as a prose poem in 271 sections of greatly varying length doesn’t get you very far. In one way it is squarely in the tradition of Pope’s Dunciad (which it mentions): it is a poem about the betrayal of England, a yowl of anger and outrage at the prevailing imbecility Hill often addressed in his later works ...”

“... rather than being an ‘organised’ regiment of counterpoised attitudes. In this way, as Seamus Perry says in his admirable introduction to the grand, fully annotated Oxford edition of this very miscellaneous book, ‘the poet’s inward conflicts, explored so dazzlingly in Ambiguity, are cast as versions of the conflicts that shape the culture ...”

“... constitute a revival. The recent Cambridge Companion to Coleridge has a remarkable essay by Seamus Perry on ‘The Talker’, which in itself would serve as an excellent general introduction to the writer in both literary and philosophical terms. He has also edited a well-judged and helpfully annotated selection from Coleridge’s Notebooks that is ...”

“... his sermons. Mueller’s editorial choices follow the guidelines developed by the series editor, Seamus Perry, to ‘convey something of the circumstances of the original appearances of the texts’. On historical grounds this is a worthwhile goal, and by printing the two manuscripts she has found an effective way to meet it. Short of reading the ...”

“... in Santa Cruz, recently liberated from the metal halo, tending to a collection of cacti.Listen to Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss Adrienne Rich on the LRB ...”

“... still fathomless – not least to herself.Listen to Joanne O’Leary discuss Emily Dickinson with Seamus Perry and Mark Ford on the LRB ...”