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“... poet to provocateur. He was haunted by a vision he had had at the age of 22, when, while reading Blake, a voice thundered in his ear: Ah! sunflower, weary of time, Who countest the steps of the sun, Seeking after that sweet golden clime Where the traveller’s journey is done Could he recapture his youthful faith in God and poetry? Was India that ‘sweet ...”

“... in chemistry. Conversely, scientists could lecture on Iranian art (Bernal), write books about Blake (Bronowski), acquire honorary degrees in music (C.H. Waddington), investigate comparative religion (Haldane) and – above all – have a sense of history.They also tended to combine the imaginations of art and science with endless energy, free ...”

“... of Warwick is shown in orange and silver with his armour and marshal’s baton beside him. Lord George Stuart, on the other hand, assumes the costume of a stage shepherd to play the pastoral lover. One of the finest portraits is that of Teresa, Lady Shirley, painted in Rome in 1622. The daughter of a Christian Circassian chieftain, she had married Robert ...”

“... what?’ According to William Labov, a story-taker from a tradition quite different from the one George Ewart Evans represents, a sociolinguist rather than a folklorist, that is the response that every good narrator is continually evading: ‘when the narrative is over, it should be unthinkable for a bystander to say “so what?” ’ The story-taker was ...”

“... identified the authentic or “real” one.’ Quite right too; and if any radical, misled by George Galloway’s description of Hitchens as ‘a drink-soaked former Trotskyite popinjay’, should suggest that this book was written out of vanity, he would surely be mistaken. A vain man would have taken care to write a better book than this: more ...”

“... Night a great anticipation of The Waste Land. If Pope’s Dunciad, Johnson’s ‘London’, Blake’s Songs of Experience and Shelley’s ‘Peter Bell’ are set before it. Thomson takes his place in a tradition linking the Augustans and Romantics with the Moderns: a metropolitan tradition reflecting the state of Britain. This was not noticed because ...”

“... in Cardiff. Failure to adjust to his new life, an obsession with time, and too much William Blake led to fantasies of omnipotence and to a physical assault on his old headmaster. This breakdown – and the vision of redemption that accompanied it – lies behind his later statement that ‘in my 23rd year I suddenly experienced a complete revolution of ...”

“... the family house in Dorset. Her great-grandfather, Isaac Butts, had been the patron of William Blake, and her father gave her daily lessons in observation in the Blake Room, which housed 34 of his water-colours, engravings, portraits and sketches. In 1905, however, her father died and nine months later the contents of ...”

“... unembarrassed eagerness to destroy the lives of his opponents. In an infamous song of adulation, George Canning praised Pitt’s ‘Virtue’: his humility, his blameless life, his courage, his absolute integrity (‘By pow’r uncorrupted, untainted by gold’) and so on. When Britain was threatened by ‘rapine and treason’, Pitt had stood up for ‘the ...”

“... Elvira – nor to pity her. Stead’s greatest moral quality as a novelist is her lack of pity. As Blake said, Pity would be no more, If we did not make somebody poor, and, for Stead, pity is otiose, a self-indulgent luxury that obscures the real nature of our relations with our kind. To disclose that real nature has always been her ...”

“... both safety and advantage. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments On 13 March President George W. Bush wrote to four Republican Senators informing them that he would not be ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, aimed at reducing worldwide emissions of ‘greenhouse’ gases, especially carbon dioxide – the same protocol Al Gore as Vice-President had ...”

“... prodigious oeuvre. But one constituency has remained more or less silent about Blunt: the academy. George Steiner’s searching New Yorker essay in 1980 provoked no particular response from art historians and theorists. The British Academy debated Blunt’s expulsion after his exposure, but despite rancorous arguments and the dramatic resignation of ...”

“... to a priest is like coughing to a cop, will hardly stand up against, say, the theology of William Blake. The name ‘Satan’ in the Old Testament means something like ‘accuser’, and represents the demonic image of God of those who insist on regarding him as an avenging judge. Part of the point in seeing God in this hostile, Nobodaddy fashion is to make ...”

“... and holes torn in the knees of their jeans. Most ludicrous Londonism of all is a 1972 claim about George Best: ‘Though he lives in Manchester, he was, and still remains, a swinging Londoner.’ The book has a marked reluctance to include groups who’ve developed outside London (there’s no space for U2 or Massive Attack, Joy Division or Led Zeppelin). Nor ...”

“... Marginalia can sometimes seem the best way into a writer’s head. Those, like Blake and Coleridge, who could not help scribbling in the margins of what they were reading let us imagine their thoughts just as they spring into life. Inspiration and irritation can appear equally raw. If you want to catch sight of Alexander Pope in the hatching of his satire, and you have a British Library reader’s card, you can call up item C ...”