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“... as the creator of mankind, a tradition followed by Ovid in the Metamorphoses, rendered by Ted Hughes as follows: Then Prometheus Gathered that fiery dust and slaked it With the pure spring water, And rolled it under his hands, Pounded it, thumped it, moulded it Into a body shaped like that of a god. Though all the beasts Hang their heads from ...”

“... right about the decline of what Virginia Woolf called ‘frock consciousness’ in literature. Ted Hughes’s ‘A Pink Wool Knitted Dress’, from Birthday Letters, which Watt includes, is an account of his and Sylvia Plath’s wedding. She wore what the title suggests, but beyond repeating the phrase twice within the poem ...”

“... composer and one-time producer, Alexander Goehr remembers – and as a medium for listening to. Peter Maxwell Davies recalls how, as a boy on a council estate in Swinton, he would listen ‘every evening, more or less from the moment it started till the moment it shut down, while I was doing my homework. And it was the best education I could ever have ...”

“... Jardine who masterminded the notorious ‘bodyline’ tactics of Larwood and Voce; as captain, Peter May too was criticised for short-pitched bowling, time-wasting and nullifying the immortal Sonny Ramadhin’s fiendish spin by simply kicking the ball away down the leg side.It was axiomatic that only the upper-class amateur possessed the leadership ...”

“... section makes room for Monty Python but not Geoffrey Hill, or Tony Harrison, or Thom Gunn, or Ted Hughes, or Craig Raine, or James Fenton, or Paul Muldoon, all of whom the Norton squeezes in at the eleventh hour. Ricks, for whom Heaney provides an effective endpoint, is probably right that many anthologies falter with the telltale compression of pages. But ...”

“... determined to tear up the weedy old turf. Scargill, Benn, Ken Livingstone, even the pathetic Peter Tatchell, are harassed and hounded with a venom and persistence which have no justification and no precedent. Well, perhaps one precedent. When the right-wing press launched the New Bullying some ten years ago by encouraging citizens to take private ...”

“... never solved. One person he particularly impresses is an artist, getting on in years, called Peter Blythe, who was – someone says at a dinner party – ‘pretty famous back in the day’. He is in fact still famous outside the village, busy putting on a new exhibition at a Mayfair gallery, but most locals think him eccentric or ludicrous or dangerous ...”

“... though he did not expand on the way they seize on symbolic language for their own purposes. Peter Dronke has shown with great warmth and sensitivity how visionaries like Hilde-garde of Bingen in the 12th century, and Marguerite Porete at the beginning of the 14th, developed an original, feminist subjectivity in their ecstatic writings. Marguerite de ...”

“... should have been digested or they shouldn’t have been broached. The TLS furore or fury about Peter Reading’s poem ‘Cub’ – anti-semitic, or dramatising anti-semitism? – isn’t appropriately or commensurately to be engaged with in two pages of musings (under the aegis ‘Or Only Funny and Sad?’), ending with: ‘Tone is a fearfully difficult ...”

“... about a dozen times in his life – ever did any ‘Casting and Gathering’, it wasn’t with Ted Hughes, to whom the poem thus entitled is dedicated, but here, in the play of question and answer with O’Driscoll, who died in 2012, predeceasing his great mentor.‘I, or my books.’ For the duration of this brief, as it were twilit interval, Heaney is still ...”

“... The war​ rescued my father, Peter Raban, from his first job as a probationary teacher in the West Midlands and restored him to his proper station as an officer and a gentleman. He had hoped to go on to university (Oxford or Cambridge) from his boarding school in Worcester but his dismal Higher School Certificate results nixed that ambition ...”

“... mean agonised rather than lyricism. There are poems in what English readers might recognise as the Hughes holocaust-vein, stripped of all crow whimsy: you realise suddenly that holocausts are not for the pleasure of poets. His work comes as close to asserting what Hamburger calls the ‘commonplace’ about ‘the impossibility of writing poems after ...”

“... Even a truly vile and racist humiliator of women is ‘more sad than bad’. Wendy, meet Peter. One reason we can accept Kate’s disillusion with her work is the poignancy of her daughter’s need for her. (‘This is my mummy. Isn’t she lovely and tall?’ Emily says proudly when Kate comes with her to school.) Another is that her job is ...”

“... air’. The various ‘horrid problems’ of Princess Margaret, her love affair with the divorced Peter Townsend, and her perceived reluctance to undertake royal duties, could be similarly teased away. From a sweltering hot Uganda the queen mother wrote to her younger daughter that every dignitary ‘looked gravely at my flushed & streaming face, & my red ...”

“... of nearly a hundred thousand people attending his funeral in Belfast. One week later, Francis Hughes died, and eight more men – Patsy O’Hara, Raymond McCreesh, Joe McDonnell, Martin Hurson, Kevin Lynch, Kieran Doherty, Thomas McElwee and Michael Devine – starved themselves to death in the months that followed. During that summer of 1981, the ...”