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“... Great Oven. The Fever Patch. Babylon. The Great Wen. In the early autumn of 1822 the ten-year-old Charles Dickens entered his kingdom. At any moment of excitement Ackroyd is prone to such ventriloquism. He does not describe the squalor of Warren’s Thames-side blacking factory – he feels it and bang goes the grammar again: This is the haunted place of ...”

“... Haskell on controversies about the transition from Late Roman to Early Christian art; Bernard Williams, in a wonderful and unsummarisable essay called ‘Naive and Sentimental Opera Lovers’, writes about distinctions in operatic taste, the sources of the power of opera, what it is to be an opera lover, and Berlin’s responses to opera in ...”

“... monotonously small follower Philip Larkin’, etc? If he despises William Carlos Williams, Dylan Thomas, Gertrude Stein, Robert Lowell, Charles Olson, Edith Sitwell, Augustus John and Ted Hughes, what’s the merit of vulgarity and spleen? Many trees have been cut down to make the paper on which Grigson has ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... extreme optimism Godwin expressed in Political Justice (1793) and the profound pessimism of Caleb Williams (1794). And he did not share in the enthusiasm for war expressed on all sides as England embarked on hostilities in an attempt to root out the bases of contagious terror across the Channel. ‘Alas! half the actions of our lives are ...”

“... Sir Clough Williams-Ellis is best known nowadays as the owner-architect of Portmeirion, the hotel he built as a partly cliff-hanging, partly tree-nestled village on a North Wales coastal estuary, adding to it building by building across some fifty years. Always astonishing, some think beautiful, it enjoyed its greatest publicity as the setting for the cult TV series, The Prisoner ...”

“... monarchist. He is represented here by ‘To Penshurst’, with a gloss based on Raymond Williams which criticises the poem for concealing its politics behind apparently ‘natural’ images. But there is some force in Alastair Fowler’s counter-argument that Jonson’s poem, far from excluding labour, helped to pioneer in England a Georgic ...”

“... Thirties, Gielgud was able to put into practice some of the lessons he had learned from Harcourt Williams at the Old Vic, and through Harcourt Williams from Granville Barker. These were simple productions with continuity of action and unity of design, and were entirely modern in feeling. Wardle quotes Tyrone Guthrie as ...”

“... he was a born academic, absorbed in his armchair analysis of morals and social institutions, and Charles Lamb got his temperament right when he dubbed him ‘the Professor’. The book which made him, Political Justice (1793), was certainly not meant to emulate Tom Paine’s Rights of Man in whipping up the political passions of the man in the street. It was ...”

“... the most admired by writers and critics. It wasn’t just the usual modernist suspects like Pound, Williams, Stevens and Marianne Moore who sang his praises, but other, very different kinds of poet too: Robert Graves, Dylan Thomas, Octavio Paz, Louis Zukofsky and Charles Olson. As did any number of critics: Edmund ...”

“... English poets who had heard rumours of Black Mountain College, read their Pound and William Carlos Williams, cannibalised Donald Allen’s influential anthology, The New American Poetry (1960), but never experienced a prime specimen of this fascinating otherness. Where Dorn was exceptional, as Prynne points out, in a conversation recorded at a reception after ...”

“... Talking about a visit to New York in 1945, Powell will come up with paragraphs on Tennessee Williams, silent movies, his wife’s pregnancy, American buyers’ attitudes to British war movies, the possibility of his buying United Artists with Emeric, the demise of the silents, meeting Salvador Dali, then suddenly: Do I digress? Well I digress. Art has ...”

“... he proclaims the artificiality of his mode in his opening sentence, where he announces that Fanny Williams, his heroine, ‘would have been much better off in an opera than a novel’. This is to be an operatic work – opera being another medium which deals in gross magnification. Child of a humble Welsh background, Fanny was a successful model and ...”

“... in English Poetry’ to the British Society of Aesthetics in 1961, Empson gave William Carlos Williams and his reviewers an exasperated wallop: The most unexpected American critics will be found speaking of him with tender reverence; they feel he is a kind of saint. He has renounced all the pleasures of the English language, so that he is completely ...”

“... while supervising a Work Projects Administration programme. She had had a copy of William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain at the corner of her desk, which she had bought so she’d have something to read on the long subway ride to and from work. The couple had a son, Paul, in 1943, a musical prodigy and now a well-known violinist and ...”