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“... power of women, on the other, have a striking relevance to our own social and political history. Jonathan Crewe, in the recent, excellent Pelican Shakespeare Narrative Poems (1999), is particularly good on the sexual politics of these works, and the new and complex critical life they have taken on. The sonnets are, editorially and bibliographically, another ...”

“... Blaise Pascal, George Fox, Jacob Boehme, Angelus Silesius, William Law, William Blake, William Wordsworth and Bernardette, among tens of thousands of others, needs lessons in spirituality or mysticism from Asia.Gibran’s fans seem to think that it is incumbent on the unenchanted to explain why he remains so popular and why his books sell so many copies in ...”

“... Beatrix Potter and her darker allegories (‘Squirrel Nutkin ... external menace ... paranoia’). Jonathan Cott would have done well to take to heart the warning communicated here. Pipers at the Gates of Dawn consists of interviews with six children’s authors and illustrators, and one pair of folklorists (the Opies). Cott has studied his material deeply and ...”

“... at least the middle of the 20th century. Can there be a proper history of working-class reading? Jonathan Rose believes that there can be, and after five hundred pages, 24 tables and more than 1600 footnotes it’s clear he has a point. His introduction (still more the publisher’s blurb) makes much of the book’s ‘innovative research techniques’, the ...”

“... to disguise the poverty of the present. This would condemn the medium of Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth to the status of a dead language. The compulsory canon of literary monuments now being championed by right-wing educationalists is, it goes without saying, an English-language canon. At a time when our politics are dominated by European ...”

“... as the poetic landscapes between its covers’, which included those of Shakespeare, Thomas Gray, Wordsworth and the Border ballads. But it was British in a determinedly monolingual way (Palgrave even worried about including Burns’s Scottish dialect). He included nothing medieval (none of his poets was born before the 1550s), and, after a minor tussle with ...”

“... ladies the gardens could never be fashionable. All this was to change under the proprietorship of Jonathan Tyers, a Bermondsey tradesman who managed to conceal his background in the leather industry and project himself as a man of learning and culture, establishing his family as lesser gentry in Surrey. He took on the Vauxhall lease in 1729, at the age of ...”

“... autobiographical (Goodbye to Berlin, Mr Norris Changes Trains), along with a biography of him by Jonathan Fryer. And so I had also long known – a bit – about Bachardy. I knew back then, for instance, that he was considerably more to Isherwood than just a protégé. They had been lovers since 1953, when the writer was 48 and the artist-to-be only 18. They ...”

“... Tamworth and Elford places him in the company of his hero, as well as those much younger walkers, Wordsworth and Coleridge.) Hermsprong finally marries Grondale’s daughter – expelled from home by her father for refusing to accept a husband of his choice – after revealing himself to be the true owner of Grondale’s ill-gotten estates. Little or nothing ...”

“... naive, but, as poetry, it is neither innocent nor natural. Davies was not long in liking Keats. Wordsworth, with his fondness for statistics, came later, and Davies wrote: I judged it was seven pounds in weight,    And little more than one foot long. A tremendous smoker of his pipe, Davies was blushingly mild and shy in his daily life, or so the new ...”

“... In reviewing a book on literary theory recently, a noted American structuralist, Jonathan Culler, drew a stern line between the sort of assumptions about literature that might do for ordinary ‘readers’ and those that are currently giving ‘vitality’, as he put it, to ‘literary studies’. The point is well taken; and it also casts a certain light on the present book, Deconstruction and Criticism, as well as on the general condition (and conditions) of American academic ‘vitality ...”

“... that all interpretation is necessarily misinterpretation (reduced by calmer exponents such as Jonathan Culler to the uncontentious assertion that no interpretation can ever be final), and the dashing new formulation of the old problem of intention – Ellis argues with force and clarity. Moreover he happens to believe that some writings are more complex ...”

“... violence) they buy out. The poet Penfield, who once asserted his independence by semaphoring Wordsworth on the battlefield, ends a kept man whose sterile chef d’oeuvre is Loon lake, published by the Grebe Press: ‘Loon Lake NY 1939. No reviews’. Joe and Penfield, master and laureate of Loon Lake, are as possessed and exploited by the Bennett class ...”

“... poetry allots him more entries than it does Owen, Graves, Sassoon or Edward Thomas, and by Jonathan Barker, whose 1985 edition of the Selected Poems reprints more than a third of his 800 or so poems. But it was Larkin who made the best case for him, when he included five of Davies’s poems in the Oxford Book of 20th-Century English Verse. The choices ...”

“... have waited a long time for the definitive full-scale scholarly biography of Charles Lamb,’ Jonathan Bate asserts on the back cover of Eric Wilson’s book, ‘but now it has arrived.’ In fact, there is more good sense in Bate’s short introduction to the 1987 Oxford edition of the Essays of Elia than in Wilson’s 521 pages. I thought it was ...”