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“... uncharitable interim biographies and Alan Franks, in the Times magazine of 31 March, talking of Blake Morrison’s South of the River coming out ‘just as Blair contemplates his awful decline from resourceful young bushytail to mangy endgame quarry’. But however much future historians may discover which is unknown to the commentators of the present ...”

“... taught at Berkeley, Heaney writes to Michael Longley: ‘stupid, illiterate, long-haired, hippie, Blake-ridden, Ginsberg-gullible, assholes (assholes or cunts, I hear you cry). Seriously though, it is an exhausting assignment with a lot of anxious and eager kids all wanting to hear they’re the greatest thing since, say, Charles Olson.’ This might be ...”

“... would often delay the shooting of a scene because he wanted to discuss every element in detail (Robert Redford, who played the Sundance Kid, just wanted to hurry up and finish). ‘Then what Paul would do with the scene would have no relationship to what we’d been talking about for the last half-hour.’ He put far more agony and effort into his ...”

“... at night’. Those solitary hours of study were evident everywhere in The Darkening Ecliptic: Blake, Shakespeare, Freud, Pound, Lenin, Longfellow, Baudelaire, Mallarmé (of whose name his own is a not so earnest comic diminutive). Dylan Thomas, Marlowe, Rimbaud, Hart Crane, all had been absorbed with startling authority into the richly-layered texture of ...”

“... But he had a practitioner’s acquaintance with the English poetic tradition, and not only with Blake, whom he edited, and Spenser and Shakespeare, whom he greatly admired. (For example, seeking a stanza form suitable for his elegy on Robert Gregory, he silently adopted that used by Cowley three hundred years earlier in ...”

“... new attributions cohere with the older ones in ways that save the phenomena. To put the point in Robert Brandom’s Hegelian way: to understand the nature of an object is to be able to recapitulate the history of the concept of that object. That history, in turn, is simply the history of the uses of the various words used to describe the object. As Jonathan ...”

“... own son, John, who also became an adept fiddler, like his grandfather. Clare felt an affinity with Robert Burns, collected songs as Burns did, and during his asylum years wrote a number of songs in the Scottish vernacular. Clare says in his autobiography that both his parents were ‘illiterate to the last degree’. Concerned to dispel the myths, Bate points ...”

“... Philosophes was being pushed off the booksellers’ shelves by such robustly patriotic novels as Robert-Martin Lesuire’s Les Sauvages de l’Europe (1760), in which a young French couple travel to England, the land of advanced philosophy, only to hurry back home after near-fatal experiences with English riots, prisons, highway robberies and insane ...”

“... in this edition. Those interested in creative writing may consult ‘Two Housman Torsos’ by Robert Conquest, TLS, 19 Oct. 1973. Those with a taste for highly creative writing should seek out A.E. Housman: New Poems [sic] ed. [sic] by John Edmunds, with a preface and notes by Hilary Bacon (San Francisco, 1985). Every word, bracket and comma here is so ...”

“... poems, comic operas and humorous essays in the Ingletonian Raconteur. Revelling in the works of Blake, Ruskin and Samuel Palmer, he was inspired by the idea that ‘reality is a thing that has to be reinvented continually.’ With no family to confine him, he used school holidays to venture out. A ‘seasoned hitch-hiker’ by the age of 16, he visited the ...”

“... reviews; gathered some into collections; wrote introductions; edited and introduced a portable Blake, Emerson and Hawthorne; fathered two children; and in three memoirs told the story of his generation’s move from the margins to the centres of American life. The first of these, A Walker in the City, published in 1951, is about Brownsville – its ...”

“... house were very different from those of the Sheffield ‘burrow’ – they were described by Robert Lowell as having ‘a weird, sordid nobility’ – but of course it was much larger, and the company tended to be noisy and numerous, whereas in Sheffield he depended on his middle-class academic colleagues for talk and drinking company and even for ...”

“... Fortunately, he discovered in himself another talent, and under the pen-name of ‘Nicholas Blake’ published a series of commercially successful detective stories, the classic genteel-class literary genre of the interwar period. At this point, Day-Lewis seemed even more of a whole-hogger for ‘the Revolution’ than Auden and Spender (MacNeice never ...”

“... or cultivate the young, and he fell in with a new generation of poets in the 1960s, including Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley, but he was not entirely at home with the spirit of the decade, or the radicalism of the New Left. His wonderful letters, in which he thinks on his fingers, clattering away with a freedom that ...”