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“... was evolved deliberately, until it carried his trademark. Without asking permission the poet Edward Thomas anthologises him. ‘Mr Thomas thanks me for “a poem”,’ writes Housman to his publisher, ‘and prints two: which is the one he doesn’t thank me for?’ In 1922, commenting on his photo portrait to ...”

“... Harry Potter of the 1830s, Tom Brown; even harder to imagine anyone settling down to read them. (Thomas Hughes did in fact write a sequel, Tom Brown at Oxford, but it’s never done as well as Tom Brown’s Schooldays: Amazon.co.uk hasn’t even heard of it.) It’s a different matter for young Tom’s Voldemort, ‘that blackguard Flashman, who never speaks ...”

“... A special 25th anniversary edition of Edward O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Consensus was published in March. Harvard University Press are advertising it together with Richard Lewontin’s new book, The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, Environment, presumably to let everyone know they’re not taking sides. Lewontin and Wilson, fiercely opposed to each other intellectually, used to have labs one directly above the other at Harvard (and weren’t on speaking terms) – an arrangement curiously reproduced in the design of the new ad ...”

“... at times are reminiscent of the Georgians and, indeed, there are a couple of references to Edward Thomas and Ivor Gurney. When he is not referring to a timeless landscape and noting the effects of the seasons, he is describing medieval buildings or people from another time.‘Durham in March’, for instance, which sees the landscape from a moving ...”

“... and what he is reading and wants to read. Yeats and Rilke dominate the talk of poetry. Edward Thomas, the figure behind the best poems in Raiders’ Dawn, is not mentioned. Lewis asks: ‘Will you copy for me Yeats’s poem “Solomon and the Witch” from the red Weekend Book … When I found it on the last morning I realised how much I ...”

“... give a reason for Marlowe’s arrest, but we know it was connected to the arrest of his colleague Thomas Kyd a few days earlier, on a charge of political libelling. During the search of Kyd’s lodgings, a certain ‘vile heretical’ manuscript was found, and under interrogation Kyd ‘affirmed’ that it belonged to Marlowe; other evidence of Marlowe’s ...”

“... upon reading a work of criticism – perhaps because, like the natural scientists described by Thomas Kuhn, we are bound by ‘paradigms of research’ which tend to direct attention to accepted modes of expression and discovery. Some time in 1987 I happened on an issue of a literary magazine left in my house by a visiting friend. My attention was ...”

“... de Briouze, Lord of Gower, and sentenced by him to hang as a rebel and a homicide. The saint was Thomas de Cantilupe, former bishop of Hereford, who had died in 1282. From soon after his death posthumous miracles had begun to be attributed to him, and he was officially canonised by Pope John XXII in 1320. The story, in outline, runs thus. On the morning of ...”

“... that Jonathan Hughes situates his study of the Duke of York’s charismatic eldest son, Edward IV. Edward has always received a mixed historiographical press. Contemporaries recognised and celebrated his energy, intelligence and good fortune, but gave due weight as well to his periodic indolence and mounting ...”

“... I must declare an interest in this particular Thomas. Dylan, R.S., above all the heart-inscribed Edward – these I admire, respect, claim. D.M. I have had little luck with. Our relationship began with the publication some years ago of The Flute Player, a novel which, I had heard, concerned the life of Osip Mandelstam ...”

“... who ran the country so well for three centuries. Consider the ‘pathetic’ abdication of Edward VIII: ‘For surely, with the benefit of hindsight, we can now recognise that the truly remarkable aspect of the abdication was not the king’s irresponsible hedonism but the establishment’s revulsion – strong enough to force him off the throne ...”

“... to exterminate than to encourage’ them. In a penitential composed around 1216, the theologian Thomas Chobham complained about contortionists, professional flatterers and musicians who went to drinking establishments and inflamed their listeners with obscene songs. (He was kinder to entertainers who sang of saints and princes and comforted the sad and the ...”

“... the piece which completes the jigsaw, putting at the centre of the first half of the 16th century Thomas Cranmer, the archbishop with the beard who created the Church of England. Cranmer’s beard dominates the cover. Instead of the familiar Flicke portrait of a clean-shaven prelate, MacCulloch or his editor (I’d bet it was MacCulloch’s choice) has ...”

“... in a form of siege warfare is appealing – Welsh hordes flinging themselves over the walls of Edward I’s castles, pitchforks at the ready – but sadly without foundation: at the first modern Olympic Games, in Athens in 1896, William Hoyt of the USA claimed the gold medal for clearing 10'10"; and he didn’t have to carry any heavy weaponry. Even the ...”

“... true that Keith Douglas was always conscious of Isaac Rosenberg behind his shoulder, Alun Lewis of Edward Thomas. But the idea of modern warfare as one thing and of poetic response to it as another seems, in retrospect, almost Churchillian in its fixedness. Back then, although we loved the old rogue for the rodomontade and sheer cheek of his rhetoric, we ...”