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“... don’t have to bother too much about showing gratitude since ‘helping us brings them extreme joy’ and ‘is their very reason for being’. There are short chapters on ‘Angels in Culture’ and ‘Angels in Religion’: if you’re some kind of cynic who thinks those are the only places angels are to be found, then this book probably isn’t for ...”

“... boy From whom all care and sorrow fly, Whose harp the Muses strung; From heart to heart, let joy rebound, Here, here, we tread enchanted ground, Here Shakespeare walked and sung! Others who liked to think of Shakespeare as Nature’s darling boy included George Romney, who from the 1760s painted a series of variations on the theme of The Infant ...”

“... their surviving son and their servants, the household included their new friends Edward and Jane Williams, their children and servants, and Mary’s half-sister, Claire Clairmont.Clairmont’s five-year-old daughter with Byron, Allegra, had died of typhus (or possibly malaria) only a few days earlier, in the convent near Ravenna where her father had more or ...”

“... Eight-Four and The Lord of the Rings. Two pieces, an admirable discussion of the novels of Charles Williams and a slightly odd ‘Panegyric for Dorothy L. Sayers’, are printed for the first time. Near the conclusion of the essay on Williams, he expresses himself as ‘horribly afraid’ that he may have given the ...”

“... he is said to have had a long affair with Mrs Sloss’s mother, Rosalind Rajagopal, née Williams – an American devotee both when he was operating under the aegis of the Theosophical Society and later when he went freelance. This rather moth-eaten scenario of a spiritual leader going to bed with a female acolyte cannot be dismissed with Rhett ...”

“... the Lawrences stripped and took a swim with him: ‘It’s what people will think!’ The joy of flouting what people will think animated E.M. Forster’s prim persona when he imagined the young men nude in a forest pool in A Room with a View, male naiads disturbed by envious or disapproving women. In the Twenties the cult of swimming athletics made ...”

“... But there were moments of real conversation and he spoke of real grievances,’ Adeline Vaughan Williams wrote after one of many visits with her husband, Gurney’s one-time teacher of composition, admirer and longstanding advocate. My own hunch is that other Gurney personae usually written off as lunatic fictions – Michael Flood, Frederick ...”

“... to be Idris Elba, the same dear friend who held my hand a year or so later while I cried tears of joy at my wedding … We were in the orangery of Longleat House in Wiltshire … loaned to us by my friend Emma Thynn, Britain’s first black marchioness, and her husband, Caewlin, the eighth Marquess of Bath … Rihanna, who was running late, burst through the ...”

“... I did from any professor.’ The Creeley of those years modelled his verse on William Carlos Williams, his sensibility on recent jazz (he listened to Charlie Parker while composing) and his fiction on D.H. Lawrence, ‘my own mentor, finally the only one I can have’. Creeley later claimed that he picked up his sense of line from the mistaken assumption ...”

“... of her book and who played so prominent a role in Nazi Germany was English: Winifred Marjorie Williams, born in Hastings in 1897. Orphaned at an early age, she came to stay in Oranienburg, near Berlin, with distant relatives, the aged Wagnerians Henriette and Karl Klindworth, in 1907. Karl had studied with Liszt, founded a conservatoire and written piano ...”

“... taking his first job at Amherst College in 1917. Pound, Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Hart Crane all lived by other means; though it’s worth pointing out that the poetry and criticism of Eliot in particular, and to a lesser extent of Pound, played a significant role in shaping the curriculum and methodologies these ...”

“... oneself in Darwin’s rather than Plato’s vocabulary can, or should, take away ‘intellectual joy’. It is not clear what could settle the question of whether Russellian ‘humility’ toward ‘objective truth’ is a more or a less dangerous form of power-worship than Dewey’s thorough-going Darwinism. In his very useful and perceptive account of ...”

“... the collection of memorabilia of such Christian writers as George MacDonald, T.S. Eliot, Charles Williams and Tolkien. It is evidence of some sort of fame. A.N. Wilson sees ‘unmistakable and remarkable evidence of something like sanctification which occurred in him towards the end of his days’, but that I do not pretend to be able to judge.Wilson himself ...”

“... and royals (Princess Marina, Queen Victoria Eugénie, the Princess Royal). Vera Brittain, Ivy Williams (‘the first woman to be called to the English bar’) and Rachel Crowdy (she ‘belonged to a generation when women had to possess very obvious strength of character if they were to attain recognition’) are the only women who might be described as ...”

“... they mean Robert Lowell, or Allen Ginsberg, or the Black Mountain imitators of William Carlos Williams. ‘The Liverpool Poets’ are regarded with a mixture of fear and derision. ‘The ranks of the illiterate raise puerile and rhythmless voices,’ wrote Roy Fuller. ‘Infantile simplicity is all,’ wrote Julian Symons.What no one in the symposium ...”