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“... John Taylor, the journalist, newspaper editor and poet, was born in 1757. His grandfather, the legendary ‘Chevalier’ Taylor, had been oculist to George II, and afterwards, so his grandson assures us, to ‘every crowned head in Europe’. He was as famous for his womanising as for his knowledge of ophthalmology, but most famous, perhaps, for his habit of prefacing every operation he performed with a long speech in praise of his own skill, composed in what he claimed was ‘the true Ciceronian’, with each main verb cunningly held back to the end of the sentence ...”

“... picture of the sorts of punishment meted out to new recruits by midshipmen:The Mids, as oft as John drew nearTo stare about him, seemed to sneer,For John as soon as e’er they saw,They knew was but a ‘Johnny Raw’.As Johnny sleeps on deck, his mattress is ‘lugged clean from under him’ by a neatly thrown fish-hook ...”

“... were also a frequent trigger. In the 1860s the High Church principles of Thomas Keble (brother of John Keble, a leading figure in the Tractarian movement) became unpopular in his Gloucestershire parish, producing resentment that might have exacerbated opposition to the enclosure of local common land. In 1864, a disturbing letter arrived for ...”

“... It was best on growing up in New India – the sights and sounds of Bombay, the remnants of John Company and the Victorian Raj, the displaced image of the American West on Eastern cinema screens. Less packed and less subjective, Shame translates the author’s consciousness (‘I have been borne across’) to the other side of the cultural divide. The ...”

“... not have a famous author, but two immensely powerful Valois dukes, Philip the Bold and his son John the Fearless, who built up a great library through purchases, gifts and commissions. Savoy, seat of the crusading Count Amédée VI and his heirs, is an appropriate location for Denis Renevey’s discussion of pan-European chivalry. Othon de Grandson, a ...”

“... and the aggressively idiosyncratic construction that is the memorial to the family of Sir John Soane (‘architect to the Bank of England &c &c &c’, as the inscription proclaims) in the burial ground next to Old St Pancras Church – the romantic spot where Shelley first caught sight of Mary Godwin, but now part of some lugubrious gardens sandwiched ...”

“... as a poet. ‘It is all a battle,’ he announced to his friend and partner in art, the painter John Minton. He and Dunsmuir lived in conditions of spectacular inconvenience: a poky caravan for some years and later a cottage to which the word ‘spartan’ doesn’t really do justice – ‘a leaking roof, no cooking stove, no electricity, an outside toilet ...”

“... his heirs. Henry certainly needed all the heavenly help he could get. Succeeding his father King John while still a child of nine, and hastily crowned at Gloucester with improvised regalia, he had himself recrowned several years later at Westminster. He was to remain preoccupied with the symbols and reality of royal legitimacy for the rest of his ...”

“... jumped, they fell, they cried. They played with dolls and flicked cherrystones at one another. John Dee, the Elizabethan astronomer and diarist, describes his son Arthur, aged about three, playing with a friend’s daughter, Mary Herbert, making ‘as it were a show of childish marriage, of calling each other husband and wife’. Francis Segar, trying to ...”

“... break with Rome. Only one did so outspokenly – and he was rewarded by a martyr’s death. John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, was executed in June 1535 for refusing (like Thomas More) to take the oath of succession. He was prepared to swear to the succession itself, which he believed that King and nobles were entitled to change, but was unwilling to ...”

“... by Philip Gross (three years on) 41; Jouissance by William Scammell (two years) 38; Disbelief by John Ash (three years) 55; Ken Smith’s Wormwood, a collection of poems written during a spell as a writer in residence in Wormwood Scrubs (one year), 30. The justification for such work-rates, beyond the economics of scraping a living and the PR requirement of ...”

“... of expression’. Now English poetry, dormant since Chaucer and Lydgate, got to its feet and sang. John Leland, a friend of Wyatt’s youth, later wrote: ‘The English tongue was rude, its verses vile/Now, skilful Wyatt, it has known your file.’ The only blot on Wyatt’s record was his marriage to the daughter of a Kentish baron, Elizabeth Brooke. We do ...”

“... called Animals, and in one edition, I think in 1968, a thrilling article by the ornithologist John Gooders described how he’d seen two hundred species of birds in Britain in a single calendar year. I never got anywhere close. There were so many more birds that I hadn’t seen than I had. I often tried to turn common birds into uncommon birds. Those ...”

“... too. Greetings, borrowers. What I admire – not the word – about the poems is their intensity. John Berryman once said: write as short as you can, in order, of what matters. Surely no one – least of all Berryman himself – can have fulfilled the terms of that prescription as scrupulously as Hamilton. The majority of the poems are generated by one of two ...”

“... that is taking the Irish princess Isolde, who is affianced to Tristan’s uncle, King Marke, to Cornwall. Preceding this journey was an earlier sea voyage, when Tristan, grievously wounded, had set off alone in a frail skiff for Ireland, in the hope of being ministered to by Isolde, renowned for her healing arts. Since the foe who wounded him and whom he ...”