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“... among the most distinguished poets in England, admired by Johnson, envied by Goldsmith, praised by Wordsworth, and read by everyone, Anna Letitia Barbauld has this last century or two thoroughly sunk into oblivion. Until recently, all that was remembered about her was an anecdote in Coleridge’s Table Talk, in which she figured, ingloriously, as the stooge ...”

“... I first met William Empson fifty years ago, when he was teaching in Japan and I in Singapore. I was rather frightened of him. Only about my own age, he was a great deal more sophisticated and infinitely more intelligent. It was plain that he didn’t suffer fools gladly, and in his presence I often felt rather a fool ...”

“... In April 1792, William Pitt, the ‘heaven-born minister’ as his Tory supporters liked to call him, made what we can now recognise as one of the first of many attempts to cast off the perception that the Tories are the nasty party. The slave trade, he told the Commons, was ‘the greatest practical evil that ever has afflicted the human race’, and a ‘stigma on our national character ...”

“... had brought out crucial differences between the two men which each had refused to see: as William Haller said long ago in his astute and still highly readable Early Life of Robert Southey (1917), the scheme was thrilling to Coleridge as a philosophical experiment, while appealing to Southey chiefly as a set of rules. Coleridge, ever eager to find in ...”

“... of the price of coals, or of potatoes. It takes money to provide the exuberant childhood that Wordsworth celebrates in his ‘Immortality Ode’: glorious in the might Of untamed pleasures That factory boys and young mill-hands should be denied this was bad enough: that little girls should also be set to work seemed insupportable. The working girls ...”

“... as well as admirers, dividing opinion over the next two hundred years with comical extremity. William Hazlitt, although notionally on the same side in the big political questions of the day, was pugnaciously uncharmed by the cast of mind that he discerned in Shelley’s dashing about, and anticipated a whole school of criticism: ‘There is no caput ...”

“... something encouraged by Arnold’s mother (‘he was the apple of her eye’) and by a Dorothy Wordsworth-like, quasi-incestuous relationship with his elder sister ‘K’ (Jane Arnold). Honan’s attention to Jane (a background figure for other biographers) verges on the compulsive; her index entry reads: ‘Forster, Jane Martha, née Arnold (M. A.’s ...”

“... of nationality are caused by people wandering about. For example, the trial of the other Joyce – William Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw – demonstrated that a man born in Brooklyn and brought up in Ireland could be hanged as a British traitor for war crimes committed in Germany. William Joyce and James Joyce had their British ...”

“... volume of new poems, is aimed squarely at transcendence. The title has a humble and practical William Carlos Williams ring to it, but that is misleading. It is better understood as having been distilled from ‘I must be seeing things’, said seriously, and with a fair amount of stress on the ‘I must’. The greatest difficulty for the poet is how to ...”

“... sugar and snails and sex cults and the dead children of children’s book authors. She wrote about William Morris and Mariano Fortuny. She wrote about Cambridge, where she and her sister Margaret Drabble were educated in the 1950s, and about the landscape of Yorkshire, where they were raised. She wrote about the educational revolution of the 1960s and the ...”

“... inferiors, but not every writer has actually moved in with them. Reynolds did. It is as though Wordsworth had set up house with Alice Fell, Simon Lee and the old Leech-Gatherer. In 1906, after several visits to the East Devon coast, Reynolds at the age of 25 left his home town, Devizes, to become a more or less permanent lodger in the house of Bob Woolley ...”

“... Tabor is a more restricting instrument. Motion warns us that Tabor was a sometime imitator of Wordsworth with a poetic tone as ‘dry as biscuit’. And at moments he plausibly resembles a genuine Wordsworthian bore (the narrator of ‘The Thorn’, for example): ‘a miniature grandfather clock known I believe as a grandmother’. Consistently pursued ...”

“... Synge’s preface to The Playboy of the Western World has known a fame equal to the play. Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical Ballads approaches it. Although every one of these pieces of prior matter is made of language, only prefaces and forewords must announce an oncoming text. Persons can be introduced, prologues can precede plays, prolegomena ...”

“... deconstruction had long been the extracurricular resort of clever or bored philosophers; as in William James’s Hegelian revelation under the effects of laughing gas: ‘What’s mistake but a kind of take?’ De Man had broached the idea in his first book. Blindness and Insight (1971). In Allegories of Reading (1979), the only other book he lived to ...”

“... In the summer of 1831, James Woods, master of St John’s College, Cambridge, and Wordsworth’s former tutor, decided that his college should have a portrait of its most celebrated living alumnus. He commissioned Henry William Pickersgill – an apprentice Spitalfields silk-weaver turned Royal Academician – to produce a full-length oil painting of Wordsworth in an appropriately sublime setting, and in the early autumn of 1832 Pickersgill made the journey to Rydal Mount ...”