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“... Castle, a plain inscription remembering him as ‘Servant to Queen Elizabeth, Councillor to King James, and Friend to Sir Philip Sidney’. Greville’s life of Sidney, written in the earlier part of James’s reign, is a study in failure. ‘He never was magistrate, nor possessed of any fit stage for eminence to act ...”

“... a declaration of innocent loyalty to her sister, dated 2 August 1556, to her reaction to the Bartholomew Massacre (‘a thing of a terrible and dangerous example’), to her rebuke to her favourite of favourites, the Earl of Leicester, for exceeding his powers in the Netherlands (‘we could never have imagined ... that a man raised up by ourself and ...”

“... standard Twickenham Edition of Pope’s poetry, the volume given over to The Dunciad, edited by James Sutherland, attempts to present both the 1729 and 1743 versions of the work. It is wonderfully scholarly and informative, and unreadable except by the most sedulous academic. Sutherland’s notes bewilderingly intertwine with Pope’s, and the annotations ...”

“... the first poet I fell in love with as a teenager. My English teacher (who preferred Pope and Henry James) mocked me for my taste, reminding me of Shelley’s description of Wordsworth in ‘Peter Bell the Third’ as ‘a solemn and unsexual man’. Never afraid of being thought either solemn or unsexual I persevered, and even persuaded my history teacher to ...”

“... taken it over. In English tradition she came to be known as the Witch of Endor, and in the King James translation she is ‘one possessed of a familiar spirit’, while the Douai version endows her with ‘a divining spirit’; in the Jerusalem Bible she becomes a ‘necromancer’ and the Revised Standard Version makes her a tawdry ‘medium’. But ...”