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“... Law and Astrology’. Jones is best remembered now for the Banqueting House in Whitehall for James VI and I, but more consequential in many ways was the layout of Covent Garden, the first square or ‘piazza’ to break with the higgledy-piggledy of medieval London and surrounded by the first terraced houses. On one side of it he built the church of St ...”

“... from him – though she knew she shouldn’t. This confessor, Monsignor Volpi, the auxiliary bishop of Lucca, never had much time for Gemma. He seemed to regard her as a potential embarrassment. He didn’t accept that her experiences were divine graces and ordered her to terminate her ecstasies as soon as she felt them beginning. Even after the ...”

“... rewarded by John with lands. Under Henry III he continued to prosper and became a baron. His son James (c.1220-77) was a royalist too in the Barons’ Wars and became Justiciar of Ireland in 1270. Two of his sons had descendants, the elder was the ancestor of the baronial family of Audeley of Heleigh Castle, Staffordshire and Red Castle, Salop which died out ...”

“... of self-fashioning, he is an essentially Jacobean product. Sometime after the accession of King James in 1603, he gained entry to the court of the precocious young Prince of Wales. According to Bishop Fuller, ‘Prince Henry allowed him a pension and kept him for his servant. Sweetmeats and Coryate made up the last course ...”

“... Homer and Virgil and Chaucer accompanied Stendhal and Jane Austen, Dickens and Tolstoy and Henry James; and near the end was one poem that certainly might, in its intensity, be described as ‘short’ – Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. This almost token poem, a magnificent simple affair that most of us did at school, is the world’s most ...”

“... is still somehow Anglican, but an ecumenical Anglican. A representative Catholic equivalent is James McConica, with his specialised study English Humanists and Reformation Politics under Henry VIII and Edward VI (1965), followed by his recent excellent short general book in Oxford’s Past Masters series. For a general assessment that is longer and fuller ...”

“... however, because, as he declared at the beginning of these remarks (his set of annotations on Bishop Watson’s Apology for the Bible), ‘to defend the Bible in this year 1798 would cost a man his life.’ Therefore Blake does not publish his thoughts, as Paine had earlier published his similar thoughts, because to do so, in 1798, would place a person in ...”

“... who have not made it, cannot. He then, no doubt correctly, tells us that 17th-century thinkers – Bishop Wilkins, for example, and Mersenne – had said this before Vico. If Professor Aarsleff were to look again at my essay, he would find that (following men more learned than I am) I trace this doctrine, not to the 17th century, but rather further back – to ...”

“... interests produced a potentially subversive treatment of republicanism in Sejanus: but he became James I’s court poet, and Paulin deals fairly brusquely with Jonson as a conservative monarchist. He is represented here by ‘To Penshurst’, with a gloss based on Raymond Williams which criticises the poem for concealing its politics behind apparently ...”

“... Williams liked these a great deal, and wrote to say so. He also tried to persuade his publisher, James Laughlin at New Directions, to take her on, though to no avail. In reply he received from Nardi a long series of bitter missives that castigate him for smugness and selfishness, and reveal her own despair: ‘Your whole relationship with me,’ she tells ...”

“... or the recollected terrors that it seeks to make good. Writing to his brother Stanislaus in 1905, James Joyce conceded: ‘I think Wordsworth of all English men of letters best deserves your word “genius”.’ Joyce was unlikely to be much taken by nature mysticism: what he may have found to admire in Wordsworth was his awareness of the momentousness that ...”

“... the period’s wealthiest author. In comparison, the circumstances of the very set-up indeed James Merrill (like Roussel an addicted poetic formalist), driving his own Volkswagen and using a homemade Ouija board all those years, seem positively peasant-like and self-reliant. Alison Lurie recently described Merrill in Connecticut, chatting in his kitchen ...”

“... and then ‘the sea full of floating brown pennies of oil’, an image and a phrase Elizabeth Bishop might not have disdained, with its quiet metaphorical swell. The rhythms and play of sounds, the subtle presence of things remembered in things seen, convey a genius for observation that one doesn’t think of as Forsterian. The ...”

“... the poet asks in an appeal from Meung-sur-Loire, near Orléans, where he was detained at the Bishop’s pleasure, probably in 1461. ‘Epistre a ses amis’ reads now, in the light of so much scholarship, translation, loose-clad homage and general ventriloquism on the part of a wide and posthumous circle of acquaintance from Swinburne to Lowell and ...”

“... own father was called Ignatius Dark. Sometimes you see him silently shaking with laughter – the Bishop of Gloucester begins an article on Christian doctrine: ‘The Apostle’s Creed need not detain us long.’ Among his friends Benson and G.M. Young top the list; Churchill displays such extraordinary power that in this feline company he is a little out of ...”