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“... for the imagination in which we all have a shared stake. Like the other great Victorian poets, Robert Browning came of age as a writer vividly aware of the exciting powers of Romantic inwardness, which, like most of his contemporaries, he found a burden as much as a spur to new achievements. His early poems revolve about subjectivity in an appropriately ...”

“... to do with Pindar. Elsewhere, when a certain grossness is needed, the chance is missed. Both Sir Robert Stapylton (1647) and Henry Fielding (1743) have a go at translating Juvenal’s ferocious account of the profligate Empress Messalina working as a prostitute in a Roman brothel and both suppress Juvenal’s reference to gilded nipples (‘papillis ...”

“... 1887 had made many other charges under the heady influence of a group of clever and unscrupulous young Irish Unionists who had captured the paper, then under the nominal direction of a senile manager and an infant editor. Parnell, Michael Davitt and the Land League were accused of having inspired agrarian outrages including murder, arson, horse-gelding and ...”

“... biographies of Keats appeared within a short time: W.J. Bate’s and Aileen Ward’s in 1963, Robert Gittings’s in 1968. Each is still very useful; all were admirable, if in different ways. W.J. Bate, who had been interested in Keats ever since he wrote his undergraduate thesis on the poet in 1939, paid special attention to Keats’s stylistic ...”

“... a new magazine targeted readers who did not want it to end. Soldier of Fortune was founded by Robert K. Brown, a former Green Beret based in Boulder, Colorado, who made the profitable discovery that his publication could double as an employment agency for mercenaries and a weaponry catalogue. The magazine’s classified ads offered an eclectic menu of ...”

“... things soon turned sour. At first it must have seemed an entirely trivial matter: Clodius, a young man of the distinguished Claudian family, was found in the house of the pontifex maximus, one Julius Caesar, while his wife was leading women-only rites there in honour of the never-to-be-named ‘Good Goddess’. As the affair dragged on towards a ...”

“... Castle – a nightly feast in August as the military tattoo concludes its parade. In his boyhood, Robert Louis Stevenson would sometimes be surprised while walking in the New Town to ‘see a perspective of a mile or more of falling street, and beyond that woods and villas, and a blue arm of sea, and the hills upon the further side’. I stopped at the corner ...”

“... precisely from the skill with which he has blocked off implication and afterthought. Long ago, Robert Bridges observed about one of Keats’s lines that ‘it displayed its poetry rather than its meaning.’ That was once a criticism, certainly, but neither the old nor the new Decorated styles are subject to the censure that attends the absence of meaning ...”

“... understood. His poem ‘The Hoard’ follows successive owners from elf to dwarf to dragon to young warrior to old miser, all poisoned by their greed. In The Hobbit he calls avarice ‘dragon-sickness’: you catch it from the gold itself. Ogden’s book is a splendid guide to the development of the dragon over more than two millennia, and it’s almost ...”

“... of junked cars. This is the Avery family’s salvage yard, where the incinerated remains of a young photographer called Teresa Halbach were discovered in November 2005. Steven Avery and his 17-year-old nephew Brendan Dassey were found guilty of Halbach’s murder in 2007, and both were sentenced to life imprisonment. Four years after the quashing of his ...”

“... authors write in a lifetime. (Most of my books are ones he ought to have written.) I imagine the young Michael I never met, the Thin Man, somewhat like the young Coleridge in unstoppable verbal flow as he tramped the Lakeland fells – a spectacle that those who met the poet in middle age, histrionic and bedridden at Dr ...”

“... It was here on 10 June 1904 that James Joyce met Nora Barnacle, who worked in the hotel. The two young strangers who had locked eyes stopped to talk, and they arranged to meet four days later outside the house where Sir William Wilde, eye surgeon to the queen in Ireland, if she should have ever needed an eye surgeon (which she did not), and his mad ...”

“... would come to resent Auden’s tendency always to think of him as he had when they were both young, as though he had never grown up, but Spender himself returned repeatedly to those days as though to some rite of passage. In World within World (1951), the memoir he published while still only in his early forties, Spender gives the encounter the force of ...”

“... and the square memorial stone put up by Godwin to Mary still standing. This was where Shelley and young Mary did their wooing; the bones beneath it were moved to Bournemouth when the railway was cut through in the 1860s, but the monument remains. When I started to research Mary Wollstonecraft’s life, her books were hard to find outside the British and ...”

“... begins with a most effective Eliotian part-quotation, conflating Shakespeare’s ‘When I was young (as yet I am not old)’ with the Psalmist:‘I have been young and now am old; yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken.’ I have been young, and now am not too old; And I have ...”