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“... the liberal Enlightenment, a politics from which this volume is not light-years remote. William Blake thought that art should not be too obvious in case it fell into the rationalist trap of false transparency; but he was also quick to see how cults of mystery were exploited by both priest and king to legitimate their power. There is no reason to assume that ...”

“... They carried on doing very English things on which Edward Lear (his landscapes and his nonsense), Blake and Samuel Palmer were plausible influences. As well as exponents of this brand of applied art and romantic landscape, and of what now looks like late Post-Impressionism – Matthew Smith, Duncan Grant, Frances Hodgkins, Victor Pasmore – there were more ...”

“... all others. It was founded in Oxford by Edward Lean, the younger brother of the film director David Lean, and was dedicated to the reading and discussion of creative work in progress. When Lean graduated, Lewis took it over. The group was for men only. (Dorothy L. Sayers, a keen Christian and an admirer of Lewis, was excluded.) At first, meetings were ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of discussion, and there were intermittent episodes of excitement around a Watteau, Greuze or David. When an artist had something revelatory to say, when he found ways to represent previously latent perceptions and structures of feeling, an audience was ready to respond. But in the absence of such exceptional art, the business of painting and sculpture ...”

“... the ‘principles and practice’ of the leading painter of the French Revolution, Jacques-Louis David, as he was of Repton and Brown. In discussions of painting Knight professed himself a colourist. He disliked the contemporary fashions for heroic subjects, statuesque figures, the rigidities of planar composition and line, while he praised painters like ...”

“... is Frank McGregor, whose unpublished thesis on the Rangers (Oxford, 1968) has been pillaged by David wholesale, yet who gave to him the most interesting part of his case. For McGregor, in several articles, has himself developed the argument that George Fox and others used the odium of Ranterism as a useful disciplinary control, and, in the case of early ...”

“... originated nearly two decades earlier, Ginsberg confided, in an auditory hallucination of William Blake intoning ‘Ah, Sunflower’ to him ‘like God had a human voice’. James Campbell, who introduces a note of irony into his reworking of twice-told Beat tales, refers to Ginsberg’s historic undergraduate illumination as ‘hand-held’ – perhaps an ...”

“... attacks, she responded that the term was ‘painfully accurate’, and mounted a defence of David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo, as if the prescriptive Englishman posed the already canonised Americans a grave threat. ‘We cannot be all the writers all the time,’ she wrote. ‘We can only be who we are … Writers do not write what they want, they ...”

“... Inquiry which that trial provoked. He followed the Hutton Inquiry into the government scientist David Kelly’s suicide and the ‘sexed-up’ intelligence dossier on Saddam Hussein’s mythical weapons of mass destruction before the Iraq War. He dissected the grotesquely delayed Chilcot Report, which described how the Blair government blundered into that ...”

“... and natural history within a ‘big history’ such as those outlined by the American writers David Christian and Cynthia Stokes Brown – or, in the terminology of Edward O. Wilson, in a ‘consilience’, a convergence of intellectual disciplines, humanities with science. Ultimately, all teaching in the fine arts department pays a kind of homage to ...”

“... Life of an Ordinary Man, the posthumous memoir pieced together by the publisher and journalist David Rosenthal. His source material was a series of interviews Newman recorded with the screenwriter Stewart Stern between 1986 and 1991, along with ‘oral histories’ of Newman by his contemporaries. In her foreword, Newman’s daughter Melissa says he wanted ...”

“... Dance. ‘A perfectly normal child became a mess of writhing limbs and uncontrollable grunts,’ Blake Gopnik writes. Recent scientific studies have shown ‘a correlation between rheumatic fever in children and adult psychiatric problems such as obsessive-compulsive behaviours and the severe body-image issues of what’s now called body dysmorphia – just ...”

“... between Chatterton, Wilde, T.S. Eliot and Dickens – all Ackroydian subjects (‘William Blake will be joining us shortly,’ Chatterton says). The fifth interlude recounts a face-to-face meeting between Dickens and Ackroyd (‘Some of my best friends are biographers,’ Dickens says. It’s the wittiest line he has in the book). In the seventh and ...”

“... development of Leavis’s attitude to Eliot’s poetry and criticism, and shows how Leavis used Blake and Lawrence as sticks with which to beat Eliot. ‘What Leavis does to Eliot in The Living Principle looks like a mode of psychodrama, involving rituals of expulsion and exorcism and ultimate destruction.’ P.M.S. Dawson argues that ‘Leavis’s ...”