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“... The complete sentence was: ‘No, madam! I have seen far too many myself.’ Quoting this passage, Susan Wolfson goes on to remind us that Freud comments on a neat variant of the same gag: ‘Not only did he disbelieve in ghosts; he was not even frightened of them.’ As Dr Johnson said on the subject of the possibility of a post-mortem appearance among ...”

“... that childhood, still I can’t write this thing? The lines betray a ‘crisis in reckoning’, as Susan Wolfson put it in her book Formal Charges, excerpted in Stephen Gill’s finely judged anthology of the best recent criticism of the poem. Once he had got going on that track, Wordsworth seems to have proceeded very rapidly, working his way back ...”

“... in their judgments by a ‘fatal distaste for self-criticism’, as Philip Martin puts it. In J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, the dodgy English professor David Lurie’s seduction of his student is bound up with his admiration for Byron’s poetry, Lara in particular.It’s easy to forget, in this context, that Byron was the same poet who could picture ...”

“... did succeed in getting the latter to release a huge tranche of Ford Foundation money to endow Wolfson College, Oxford, the foundation of which was Berlin’s noblest enterprise. So perhaps he was on to something when he expatiated about ethical ‘trade-offs’ between contrasting or alternative positions: the one transaction that he really did believe ...”