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“... Leo Amery’s Birmingham, sixty years or so later, empire did not mean a great deal, to judge by David Cannadine’s memoir of his not very imperial childhood which he appends to his new book. Cannadine’s aim is to answer P.D. Morgan’s challenge to envisage the empire as ‘an entire interactive system, one vast interconnected world’. This requires a ...”

“... shout their presence (the radically different visual effect of the original is illustrated in David Norton’s The King James Bible: A Short History from Tyndale to Today, as well as in Campbell’s own Bible, another history of the KJB). It’s a pity, but the change emphasises just how remote the modern ‘King James’ Bible is from its original. It ...”

“... takes special delight in exposing Thompsonian heroes such as William Cobbett and William Blake as racists and misogynists, less convincingly in the second case.) How can contempt be overcome? How can low and abused subjects become equal and respected citizens? These are troubling and important questions, but Herzog’s method of pursuing ...”

“... of his work ... cannot be talked about like the doctrines of Dante or the mental machinery of Blake ... It is not to be found in any book or set of books. Only in a very limited way can Mr Pound be discussed as it is necessary to discuss, say, Yeats: with reference to what is implicit and still to be said under the surface of what has already been ...”

“... a value on titles,’ he purred, ‘and I go with the great stream of life.’ Another member was David Garrick, who grew up alongside Johnson in provincial Lichfield, and shot to prominence in his twenties for the revolutionary naturalism of his acting style, notably his startling performance as Richard III. Garrick was elected to the Club in 1773; the ...”

“... The connoisseur of deathbeds, of the fortitude of their occupants, of the composure of the atheist David Hume, the prison visitor who liked to watch executions, and appears to have lacked Johnson’s terror of futurity, was off somewhere on business when his wife stopped living. The journal deals with his five years as the widower formed by that crisis. His ...”

“... sheep that adorns the frieze of the Parthenon (and looks as though it were drawn by William Blake himself), through the sheep of Byzantine mosaics and Mogul paintings, to those of the miniatures of a miscellany of breviaries, psalteries and bestiaries. The habitats of sheep in most countries of the world are illustrated and are identified in a variety ...”

“... and shits in America’. The group included Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Lucien Carr and David Kammerer. In August 1944, Carr stabbed and killed Kammerer. Near the end of And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, a lightly fictionalised and surprisingly engaging account of the murder and of the months leading up to it, written in 1945 by Kerouac and ...”

“... one beside the town hall and a second several blocks west. ‘At about 7.30,’ one of them, Peter Blake, remembered, ‘a roar went through the crowd, emanating from the rear. People turned and looked westwards down the street. I saw, to my amazement, a coach being driven fast straight into the back of the crowd. It was a private coach, an ordinary thirty to ...”

“... any other secondary authority. Some of these items are fairly slight, but even a short note on Blake and Reynolds, dating from 1957, makes a sharp and persuasive impact. One brief study, entitled ‘ “Borrowed Attitudes” in Reynolds and Hogarth’ (1938), is already a classic, though certain details can be challenged. Its central assertions remain ...”

“... Anglo-American literature has nothing comparable; one has to go back through Shelley to Blake in the one direction, through Melville to the New England Transcendentalists in the other, to find distant equivalents. In the music of Bloch’s words there are certainly echoes from the Rilke Busoni admired. Far more important, however, is the place of ...”

“... to revisit the recent royal wedding, and the communal singing of a peculiar poem by William Blake that has gained national anthem status. It was not much thought of until it acquired a splendid musical setting, an inspired piece of bombast by Sir Hubert Parry; ever since, the English have much enjoyed noisily pledging that they will not cease from ...”

“... This not very profound perception is pursued through long quotations from Churchill to Byron via Blake, with the aid of some discursive analysis of the prints. But there is not much about developing techniques of satire, changing functions of the media, or notable novelties of treatment. The potentially problematic relationship between the mass propaganda of ...”

“... to them. He still has a taste for generalisation, but he pairs it with the expression of what Blake called ‘Living, self-moving, mourning, lamenting, & howling incessantly’. His worldliness does not obscure this undercurrent: in his first-person poems, Merrill is often both expressive and severe. At the end of ‘Bronze’, he describes a young friend ...”

“... the topic of adoption had entered the ether … That was all. Yet the next week I was meeting Blake Watson. Blake Watson was the obstetrician who’d delivered the Erskines’ adopted daughter. Three months later he rang Didion and her husband to say he’d just delivered ‘a beautiful baby girl’ to a mother who was ...”