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“... English journeys it was the rule to be socially committed. In the 1820s it was not so. Then it was Cobbett, and not Borrow, who was the man out of line.’ (My italics.) It seems odd to defend a man against the charge that he is ‘out of line’, as if to be eccentric was to be immoral. But then, I suppose Michael Collie does, as prosecuting counsel, make ...”

“... a well-earned shift of emphasis. Hazlitt would have learned this way of thinking from his father, William Hazlitt Sr, a notable sermon-writer whose work was published by Joseph Johnson, the publisher of Wordsworth and Blake. Yet the morality of Dissent always seemed to press up against a crisis of belief. The Antinomians in New England made the challenge most ...”

“... Furzy hills and sandy trails, which had earlier in the century been regarded with distaste by Cobbett (‘villainously ugly’), came to be embellished by ‘a crop of country houses … largely on new sites’. This was not, Ian Nairn insisted, ‘at all typical of the pattern in the rest of England’. You can, to quote his near double Tony Hancock, say ...”

“... them spring apart again. Despite his tactical disavowal of earnestness, McKie knows his Defoe, Cobbett and Priestley, and his book is littered with indications that the ‘state of the nation’ is a matter of some concern to him. Following his habit of recovering forgotten precedents, I decided to continue the inquiry with the help of a writer who started ...”

“... novella ‘Tonio Kröger’. Other poems work over passages of Melville, Jonathan Edwards, Cobbett, Thiebault and others. A good many of the autobiographical poems in Life Studies are cannibalised from Lowell’s 1950s prose memoir, fragments of which survive in the Collected Prose as ‘91 Revere Street’, ‘Antebellum Boston’ and ‘Near the ...”