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“... Critical Quarterly set out to remedy this, promoting such new arrivals on the literary scene as William Golding, Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin and Sylvia Plath, all of whom soon became effectively canonised by their presence on school syllabuses. Critical Quarterly was committed to the centrality of poetry, fiction and drama to the living ...”

“... is in life itself’. Here, and again in God’s Fifth Column, he remembers, without quoting them, Wordsworth’s lines about those ‘higher minds’ which    from their native selves can send abroad Kindred mutations; for themselves create A like existence; and, whene’er it dawns Created for them, catch it, or are caught By its inevitable ...”

“... Keach and other scholars have noted, ‘the intellectual philosophy’ most clearly given in Sir William Drummond’s Academical Questions. Keach quotes the passage in which Shelley’s position, at least for the moment, is clear: ‘Nothing exists but as it is perceived. The difference is merely nominal between those two classes of thought which are ...”

“... in achieving them. Back home with a flea in his ear, he wrote florid, fruitless letters to Wordsworth and Blackwood’s Magazine, cadged gin money from his pals and became, improbably enough, secretary of the local Temperance Society. Though a confirmed atheist, he also taught in Sunday school, savaging his pupils in befuddled vengeance for his ...”

“... Byron and his half-sister) and where it seemed dangerously possible (as in the Thackeray and Wordsworth households). In addition, Christian doctrine defined husband and wife as one flesh, and this created theological reservations about marriage with a deceased wife’s sister. These marriages weren’t illegal, and they could be – and were ...”

“... except as an ironic jab. Few poetic terms have shifted in significance so much. When, around 1500, William Dunbar called a rival Scottish poet an ‘Iersche brybour baird’, each word was a studied insult. ‘Iersche’ (Gaelic) was barbarous to Dunbar’s Lowland ear; a ‘brybour’ was a vagabond; a ‘baird’ was a limited sub-poet, not a ‘makar’. A ...”

“... some of the greatest English pictures of the 19th century. Shoreham for Palmer, like Grasmere for Wordsworth, was not an enchanted birthplace to which he returned, but a deliberately sought-out paradise that he invented from scratch. Palmer had been born, in 1805, in leafy Walworth, but when young had moved with his family to Houndsditch, where his father had ...”

“... to recent times. ‘I admire his talents and Genius highly, but his is not a poetical Genius,’ Wordsworth said; perhaps predictably, since his notion of poetry differed from Dryden’s as much as Romantic ‘imagination’ differed from Augustan ‘wit’. But here is Dr Johnson: ‘to write con amore … was … no part of his character.’ Verse starved ...”

“... his 19th-century predecessors. It would, of course, make him more a Cobbett than a Burke, more a William Morris than an Evelyn Waugh. The destructive energy of capital seeking to maximise its returns is not going to be tamed by a spot of huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’. It is not going to be tamed by a spot of Anglicanism either, or any other form of ...”

“... be taught’. I wonder, disingenuously perhaps, if one of those ‘key personalities’ will be William Hone. He certainly should be. Hone is one of the ‘national heroes of our past’ who struggled to secure our freedoms and to widen the franchise. He fought hard to resist the encroachment of the executive on the province of the judiciary, and now that ...”

“... relatively unembattled. The MLA released a survey showing that Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth were still the most frequently taught authors in literature survey courses. The convention coverage on CNN and National Public Radio was serious, and the Republican pundits had bigger fish to fry – word was out that they will soon try to eliminate ...”

“... symbols are too ‘handy’.) America has a prestigious tradition of such cultural semiologists. William Carlos Williams’s sifting of the American grain (‘to discover the NEW WORLD ... what it has done to us, its quality, its weight, its prophets, its – horrible temper’), H.L. Mencken’s jocular scrutiny of the American language, Edmund Wilson’s ...”

“... Essay Recitation (followed by a 20-minute question and answer period), War of the Words (Coleridge/Wordsworth face-offs), Sixty Minutes of an Impressive Novel (selections included The Great Gatsby [Fitzgerald, 1925] and The Sound and the Fury [Faulkner, 1929]), and the Van Meer Radio Theatre Hour, featuring such plays as Mrs Warren’s Profession ...”

“... checking – she didn’t. For the earliest verified usage, we have to wait for the scholar-critic William Taylor in 1797, and even he had his doubts. He disliked ‘self-biography’, coined the previous year by Isaac D’Israeli, because ‘it is not very usual in English to employ hybrid words partly Saxon and partly Greek: yet autobiography would have ...”

“... scandalised by the animus they perceived in the Thompson biography; one response, represented by William Pritchard’s admirably balanced Frost: A Literary Life Recognised (1984), was to offer only a brief account of the biographical facts, and then centre attention on the poetry, giving Frost’s art its due. Now Jeffrey Meyers has appeared, crowing that ...”