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“... It is John Ashbery who takes the cake – in this case, the triple-decker cake with the solitary little sugar bride on top – for his description of Elizabeth Bishop: she is ‘the poets’ poets’ poet’. It sounds farcical, but it’s strictly true, and there’s as little getting round it as there is improving on it ...”

“... Shelley ménage – in a book that also explores his biographical ‘intimacy’ with Robert Louis Stevenson, Gérard de Nerval and Mary Shelley’s remarkable mother Mary Wollstonecraft – that occasions the reflection. There is something about ‘the Shelley circle’, and particularly its bizarre life abroad, that produces this effect. At its most ...”

“... town. Most of the changes which gave us the modern criminal trial, and which are the subject of John Langbein’s book, came about in the last part of the 18th century and the first part of the 19th. Their legal and practical effect from 1822 to the present has been tracked in the 54 editions of the Criminal Pleading, Evidence and Practice of ...”

“... he speaks is crammed with lovely words that could refresh the written language. Though he worships John Clare, Longley does not follow Clare in using dialect, and yet there is at the heart of his imagination a similar shyness and gentleness, a finely humane outlook with an almost mystical texture and cherishing puzzlement. Like Clare, Longley has a special ...”

“... returned together to America, and married in May 1929. By this time ‘Fuzzy’ was already seeing John Millet, psychiatrist, at the Austen Higgs Centre in Stockbridge. ‘Fuzzy’ was fatal. He was very handsome. He had genuine artistic talents. He insisted on the importance of extreme physical activity, but was himself fragile. He and Alice had eight ...”

“... we pass over in second-hand bookshops, dustily undisturbed among the essays of Shenstone and Stevenson, Birrell and Lynd. ‘It took me a while, I confess, to become interested in my pale “Uncle Octave”,’ Yourcenar reports. Nevertheless, she made a little study of this neglected essayist – and of his beloved brother, Rémo, a melancholy young ...”

“... more available on tseliot.com, and many thousands yet to come. Edited for the most part by John Haffenden, the edition builds on the collection made by the late Valerie Eliot and on many archives (especially those of Faber). Occasionally, there’s a page with only a couple of lines by Old Possum on it, and about fifty lines of small-print ...”

“... Scott sentimentality to summon, with bicycle imagery, projections of an England that never was. John Major, a gap-year, work experience prime minister, sleepwalking through the job, as a profile-raising photo opportunity between serious employment in the banking and conference-addressing industries, blundered into a reprise of Orwell’s cycling ...”

“... of editors. After reading Sidney Colvin’s edition of the letters of his friend Robert Louis Stevenson, he wrote: ‘One has the vague sense of omissions and truncations – one smells the thing unprinted.’ In the years after James’s death, his family in the United States was concerned about his reputation, especially about what Edel called his ...”

“... began by aborting Constitutional change and is ending in a state of Constitutional rigor mortis. John Major’s Government contemplates no political evolution whatever on the mainland, as distinct from in Ireland, and advertises this rigidity as ‘defence of the Union’. When it founders, however, such intransigence will be overtaken by long overdue ...”

“... We were, I later discovered, driving our way through a book I hadn’t read at the time: John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, wherein the author and his dog, Charley, lit out on the back roads of America in the fall of 1960, in a new GM pickup, in order to ‘rediscover this monster land’. Steinbeck is precise and prescient about ...”

“... as heroic, but it is also questioned. ‘Curiously enough,’ Schuyler tells Lincoln’s secretary John Hay on the novel’s last page, Bismarck ‘has now done the same thing to Germany that you tell us Mr Lincoln did to our country’. Of all the novels in the sequence, Lincoln pays most attention, though not very elaborate attention, to characters from the ...”

“... including first-rate 18th-century portraits by Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, Arthur Devis, John Opie, Jonathan Richardson and Richard Cosway, among others. The small, unattributed canvas he disposes of in 1928 is not in the same league. But it does come with an intriguing back story. Most of Henry Howard’s family’s wealth originally came from sugar ...”

“... words on the page. One of the miniature masterpieces in Wu’s new edition is the sketch of John Wilson Croker, a Tory functionary and ‘a moving nausea, with whose stomach nothing agrees’. That’s one reason Hazlitt can’t stomach him; another is that he ‘affects literature, and fancies he writes like Tacitus, by leaving out the conjunction ...”

“... narrative. Some are ‘presences’ which have escaped from the writings of Conan Doyle, Stevenson or Rabbi Loew. Like the figures from Blake’s Jerusalem that spill into the London of Sinclair’s Suicide Bridge (1979), these are fictions which, having ‘laid out a template ... more powerful than any local documentary account’, have gone on to ...”