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“... of writing. There are chapters on black authors (Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Robert Hayden, Jay Wright) as well as on 12 women writers. Toni Morrison (‘a child of Faulkner’) is given shorter shrift than she deserves and told off for being ideological, but some of these chapters – particularly the one on ...”

“... Bidart makes the case against it when he turns up a 1959 letter of Lowell’s to Elizabeth Bishop: ‘In the hospital I spent a mad month or more rewriting everything in my three books’ – Lord Weary’s Castle, The Mills of the Kavanaughs, Life Studies. ‘I arranged the poems chronologically, starting in Greek and Roman times and finally rose to ...”

“... Irish, judicious and unmalicious, is a joy to read. The title phrase, which may be traced back to Bishop Berkeley via Yeats, was quoted by Denis Donoghue in his Crane Bag essay (LRB, 21 April-4 May 1983); the essay reappears here (slightly shortened), but with the phrase extracted and expanded into an opening article, in which it and its implications are ...”

“... best that can be said on behalf of Mr Derek Pattinson, the Secretary-General of the Synod, and Mr James Shelley, the Secretary to the Church Commissioners, who passed Dr Bennett’s essay for publication, is that they may have been lulled into a sense of false security by the nature of the notably anodyne Preface contributed by Dr David Edwards, the present ...”

“... is her only physical link with childhood. Watson struggles to write an endless Latin letter to the Bishop of Winchester to prove his sanity. There is a terrible reality, too, in the abruptness with which the crises occur. Watson’s sacking from Stockwell School seems almost as inexplicable to the reader as it is to him. And when his mind finally ...”

“... To Bartolomé de Las Casas, however, another Dominican, later Protector of the Indians and Bishop of Chiapa in Yucatan, the line was too fine. ‘False testimony, a contrived argument for tyranny,’ he scribbled in the margin of one of the judgments. And the judgments, inherently unsteady, did not last. For in 1519-22 Cortes stumbled on what seemed to ...”

“... edicts against it (it was getting in the way of archery and other martial pursuits). In 1457, James II of Scotland decreed that ‘fute-ball and golfe be utterly cryed down’, while Henry VIII made football a penal offence. Under Elizabeth I, the Grand Jury of Middlesex held that it was ‘an unlawful game, a great affray likely to result in homicides ...”

“... despised his compatriots for complicity in their plight, and yearned to return to England as a bishop. Complicating things further is Swift’s mode of writing. Impersonation, projection or ventriloquism was his habit, demonstrated throughout Valerie Rumbold’s superb edition of his Parodies, Hoaxes, Mock Treatises: spoof prophecies and bogus gallows ...”

“... making love, and perhaps worst of all the ‘obnoxious and joyless’ having sex (Elizabeth Bishop also despised that expression). ‘Your Name Which Isn’t Yours’ considers the effect of having a name capriciously bestowed on you at birth, something with which you can only fully reconcile yourself when you imagine it engraved on a stone. There’s ...”

“... With his first earnings as a garden labourer, the boy walked to Aberdeen and bought six volumes of James Hervey’s Reflections on a Flower Garden – just as Clare had tramped from Helpston to Stamford, before the bookshop opened, to secure a coveted copy of James Thomson’s The Seasons. And like Clare, Sinclair paused on ...”

“... monopoly. Schama admits that this was shabby behaviour; Sharp was incensed. In a letter to the bishop of London in 1795, which does not appear in Rough Crossings, Sharp held Britain directly accountable for the maintenance of the slave trade in America. In 1772, the Pennsylvania legislature had requested the imposition of prohibitive duties on imported ...”

“... be typical of the middlebrow culture whose laureate was Longfellow and whose critical arbiter was James Russell Lowell, and from which Melville, unlike Henry James or Whitman, could not escape. Melville’s doomed attempt, in the late 1840s, to make himself into a country squire at Arrowhead, his farm in the ...”

“... Emerson wanted readers to stumble over the Latinism that punctuates this numbed passage. James Marcus tells us that it is a botanical term for the part of a plant that is easily shed as it develops. His zingy, empathetic portrait of Emerson grounds our understanding of his writing – perhaps even his wisdom – in his experience of loss. It often ...”

“... in their exotic spear-waving poses. It was some relief to see the paperback of James Fox’s excellent White Mischief with its measured exposure of the shallow callous daftness of settler society circa 1940, popping cheekily up among them. Nairobi is still Africa’s safari capital, where the lucky tourist is offered all kinds of trips to ...”

“... his fiercely sharpened pencil) was the only one of the Board who had made him nervous (the Bishop was a sweetie), so it was a blessing that on this particular morning, thanks to Canon Treacher’s precautions, the priest remained unaware of his presence. The worst tack a priest could adopt at a service such as this, and a trap Treacher was pretty ...”