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“... the ‘real’ thought of his age: he reduced Coleridge’s concept of Romanticism and Charles Darwin’s concept of evolution alike to sport. What Peacock himself said on Miss McCarthy’s topic is surprisingly like her own point of view – that literature has drifted unnecessarily far from intellectuality. But it cannot be denied that the great ...”

“... all. And Alan certainly deserved recognition ahead of such other ennobled historians as Lords Blake, Dacre and Briggs. But again, that is to miss the point. In England men who offend against taboos do not get offered knighthoods, let alone peerages. This rule was sufficient to ensure that the greatest Englishman of the 19th century, ...”

“... historically new spirit’. This revolutionary spirit is incarnated, he states, in Milton, Blake and Wordsworth, and at this stage in the critical rite Shakespeare begins to materialise as a prophet of the ‘ascendant, revolutionary, Puritan will’. At the very end of Chapter One, Hughes announces: ‘As a prophetic shaman of the Puritan ...”

“... of which every thinking man is solicitous’. Priestley’s enemies were equally eloquent. William Blake, whose own spirituality entitled him to dismiss this kind of enlightenment as stupid and blind, reckoned Priestley’s much-advertised knowledge ‘not worth a button’. In Philadelphia, William Cobbett, under the pseudonym Peter Porcupine, launched biting ...”

“... along with Bloch, that all future-oriented thought is inherently utopian, forgetting that if Blake was a visionary, Pol Pot was too. Nor is he quite alert enough to a logical problem with what he sometimes unguardedly calls a ‘total’ historical rupture: by what criteria could we identify the future that followed from such a break as the future of our ...”

“... top. Entering the House of Commons at the age of 21, which was by law the minimum age, although Charles James Fox had earlier been ‘elected’ when 19, Pitt immediately made a profound impression with his maiden speech. Instead of being the usual over-rehearsed address bearing little relation to what had been said by previous speakers, it was delivered ...”

“... exaggerated: ‘Two or three gentlemen entered, one of whom I knew by intuition to be called Dr Charles Brandon and another William Locksley Esq.’ At this probationary stage, we are treated to imperial adventures and aristocratic love affairs in exotic locales, not all of which would win the approval of the post-colonial critic: ‘Tringia lay at my ...”

“... I am then a poet, am I not? – Ha ha. The radiator, please. Well, what? Alive now – no – Blake would have written prose, But movement following movement crisply flows So much the better, better the much so. As burbleth Mozart. Twelve. The class can go. Until I met you, then; in Upper Hell Convulsed, foaming immortal blood: farewell. After the ...”

“... of a nation.’ But nationality still mattered: Seamus Heaney’s reaction to his inclusion in Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion’s 1982 Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry was ‘My passport’s green.’ Heaney, preoccupied with ‘the government of the tongue’, was drawn into the arguments about cultural identity, language, gender and ...”

“... the puritan tradition. This study by Sheila Kirk and the equally thoughtful photographs by Martin Charles that go with it at last set out the full evidence on which this claim can rest. Webb was 18 and embarking on an obscure apprenticeship in Reading when The Seven Lamps of Architecture came out in 1849. By the time he met Ruskin seven years later, he was a ...”

“... verbal receptors vibrating in harmony? Why (lack of talent apart) have more people not done what Blake did? Put his graphic versions of his poems alongside printed versions and the reason becomes clear: O Rose thou art sick. The invisible worm That flies in the night In the howling storm: Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy: And his dark secret love Does ...”

“... painters, especially during the 1910s and 1920s, finding allies among the American moderns – Charles Demuth, Charles Sheeler, Marsden Hartley. Williams’s poems can be classified as kinds of painting: landscape, seascape, ‘genre poems’ (in the sense of ‘genre painting’), still life, domestic interiors, street ...”

“... as we emerged from our hobbit holes and combed the cobwebs from our hair: the starship arrival of Blake Bailey’s authorised biography of Philip Roth, Philip Roth: The Biography. The ‘the’ of the subtitle said: accept no substitutes. Another biography of Roth was in the offing, Ira Nadel’s Philip Roth: A Counterlife, a sizeable, solidly ...”

“... in London.’ She doesn’t mention the reason she came south: when she was three her father, Charles, left and the family was forced to uproot. Her parents had not been happily married; Charles had wanted to be a sailor since he’d been a child but had been pressured by his mother to take over the family business. It ...”

“... beheaded ‘for the horrid fanatic plot, contrived for the bringing in, as they then called him, Charles Stuart, and the restoring of monarchy.’ This remark functions mainly as an alibi for his loyalty to the post-Protectorate political structure, and is intended to shield him from the charge of being a closet republican, or a classical republican like ...”