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“... more active covert gays of his time. There was a major release of new material with the grandson Charles Tennyson’s 1949 Life. Now – in the age of the welfare state – the poet’s gloom was traced to his deprived childhood. Charles Tennyson depicted, for the first time, the gothic excesses of the Somersby rectory ...”

“... object or occasion. Not that we don’t enjoy some of these essays, especially time-honoured ones: Charles Lamb on Shakespeare’s plays in relation to their stage representation is as delicious as it is dated. Yet unlike Lamb’s piece, the contemporary critical essay often demands a knowledge that is highly specialised, and uses a vocabulary drawn from ...”

“... ears’. Jennings talked and talked, a great gush of words: about art, theatre and history; about Blake, Ruskin, Faraday, Milton, Constable and Purcell. William Empson, who studied English with him at Cambridge in the late 1920s, and with whom he started the magazine Experiment, thought of Jennings as ‘quite unaffectedly a leader’ who ‘was rather ...”

“... for a deep commonalty (or maybe a depressed commonalty) surviving below the Hanoverian consensus (Blake, Stephen Duck, the poet-labourer, who drowned himself in a fit of despondency). In a way, Lucas is most interesting about the poets in between these groups, the traitors or defeatists like Wordsworth or Tennyson. Both men, after all, had strong dialect ...”

“... Monitor in 1962, it purported to follow a day in the life of four young artists: Boty, Peter Blake, Derek Boshier and Peter Phillips. For Mellor, growing up in ‘meagre’ circumstances in the East Midlands, London as the Sixties started to swing was a revelation, ‘a vision of something wonderful’. After she died Boty’s work wasn’t seen for ...”

“... The famous Turk’s Head was in Gerrard Street in Soho, a precinct first laid out under Charles II, popular with authors and artists from the start (Dryden moved to Gerrard Street in 1687 while still poet laureate), and by the mid-18th century thronged with coffee houses and taverns. A blue plaque commemorates Dryden, but on the wrong house. At ...”

“... Charles Sorley must have been the most brilliant of all the young poets who died in the First World War. Yet ‘brilliant’, with its flashy, brittle connotations, isn’t the right word. He was undeniably clever, and forthright, but also good-humoured and modest, often very funny, shrewd and serious, but never (the young man’s vice) priggish ...”

“... lead the world), Terry Harknett writes under the buckskin-evoking pseudonyms of George G. Gilman, Charles R. Pike, Thomas H. Stone. Like his compatriots ‘John G. MeLaglen’ and J.T. Edson, Harknett has ‘appreciation societies’ devoted to his pseudonymous personae. (‘J.T.’, incidentally, the biggest seller of them all, claims his name is ...”

“... to a priest is like coughing to a cop, will hardly stand up against, say, the theology of William Blake. The name ‘Satan’ in the Old Testament means something like ‘accuser’, and represents the demonic image of God of those who insist on regarding him as an avenging judge. Part of the point in seeing God in this hostile, Nobodaddy fashion is to make ...”

“... between Chatterton, Wilde, T.S. Eliot and Dickens – all Ackroydian subjects (‘William Blake will be joining us shortly,’ Chatterton says). The fifth interlude recounts a face-to-face meeting between Dickens and Ackroyd (‘Some of my best friends are biographers,’ Dickens says. It’s the wittiest line he has in the book). In the seventh and ...”

“... wrote, poetry makes nothing happen, then the poetry anthology has no such self-effacing qualms. Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion knew this, as did the predecessor they were tussling with, A. Alvarez’s The New Poetry (which was tussling with its predecessor, Robert Conquest’s New Lines). ‘This anthology,’ they wrote in their preface to the Penguin ...”

“... are given for each poet, but they are little help: a poem by Sandro Penna (1906-77) translated by Blake Robinson on page 66 seems close to some lines by Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888-1970) translated by Marcus Perryman and Peter Robinson on page 38: but is there really an echo? If so, which way does it run? And is it in the originals or only in the ...”

“... and treats it as a lively conversation across three centuries, in which Dryden and Addison, Blake and Shelley, Kenneth Burke and Northrop Frye trade insights with contemporary critics. Wittreich wears great learning lightly, and provides a salutary reminder that there is much worth remembering in older criticism; with the weight of Milton bibliography ...”

“... I read or reread two hundred or so by other writers to provide context. In 1957, the psychoanalyst Charles Rycroft described reading detective stories as ‘in a way the opposite of having psychoanalytic treatment. The motive underlying one is to deny insight and underlying the other is to gain it.’ This might be true of the characters inside the books, but ...”

“... was something of a golden age for the Church of England, before the obtuseness of James’s son Charles nearly ruined it for ever. Published under the auspices of a king who in retrospect appeared a model of Protestant commitment compared with his untrustworthy offspring, the KJB had the potential to become a uniting symbol for English-speaking ...”