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“... aie? ‘Half the poetry of the 18th century is probably written by him,’ a character says in Peter Ackroyd’s novel Chatterton. Yet he appeals equally to defenders and opponents of the canon. Chatterton was convinced of his own talent and ambitious to be recognised as one of the great English poets; but he chose to attract public attention with pastiche ...”

“... performed the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven. Beecham is ‘irresponsible’, others such as Vaughan Williams and most English composers, Elgar in particular, provided numerous examples of ‘incompetant’ conducting and playing; most of the rest, always excepting his teacher Frank Bridge, have fallible technique. Bernard van Dieren (who fails to achieve a ...”

“... sir, are a drunkard, and some of you are whoremasters’ (he’s looking at Henry Marten and Sir Peter Wentworth). Then he points to the Speaker up in his chair: ‘Fetch him down.’ When the Speaker doesn’t budge, he shouts, ‘Put him out,’ and a couple of members, rather unwillingly, drag him down, and he is marched out without the mace through a ...”

“... The high point of the trip, she told Warner, was a visit to Kensington Gardens to pay homage to Peter Pan. ‘Since I am very indulgent to my childhood romances, and keep holiday with them almost religiously,’ she wrote, ‘I just bowed the knee and worshipped like the Oriental or the Romanist at the sound of prayer bells.’ It was another role she’d ...”

“... Royal Military Police. Despite this, detectives charged a member of the patrol, Private Michael Williams of the 3rd Battalion Parachute Regiment, with murder. By the time of Williams’s trial, in 1977, the charge had been reduced to manslaughter. He was acquitted by a judge – sitting without a jury – who accepted his ...”

“... to a level at which economies might save a significant sum. It was in this context that Shirley Williams, as Minister of State for Education, put forward her 13 points. These were possible measures of economy, put forward as the first step towards a rational dialogue with universities. They were brusquely rejected, in terms which made it clear that ...”

“... true that some modern art has imitated the primitive energy, the folk spells, of graffiti. Peter Fuller’s Modern Painters, a quarterly ‘journal of the fine arts’, launched last spring, challenges many of the fashionable practices and assumptions which I have just reviewed. At first, its opponents in the art world said it wouldn’t last, then ...”

“... Rumens, Medbh McGuckian, Penelope Shuttle and others. Geoffrey Hill, Dannie Abse, Denise Levertov, Peter Red-grove, U.A. Fanthorpe, Gillian Clarke, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Elaine Feinstein are all variously represented, opening out the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties as a time of diversity and imaginative enterprise. One poet who appears in neither ...”

“... wherever he found them’ – Harry Palmer ‘came to epitomise the decline of deference’. (Peter Hitchens, in contrast, uses the framework of national identity in The Abolition of Britain, published in 1999, to issue a diatribe against the ‘social revolution’ – the disappearance of restraint, family values and ‘much-mended leather ...”

“... been photographed by the KGB in compromising circumstances with his political secretary, Marcia Williams, and had then been blackmailed to do the KGB’s bidding. He had surrounded himself with ministers who were either secret Communists or Communist sympathisers. Given the fierce libel laws in this country there was no way such allegations could be ...”

“... only has being in language. He draws richly from such literary critics as Roland Barthes and Peter Brooks, but he is a member of that rare emerging species, the male feminist, and above all, he invokes Monique Wittig and Julia Kristeva, and heats the whole by the halogen sparkle of the superanovae of the American cultural empyrean – Judith Butler, Eve ...”

“... degree of overlap between Auden and Gross. Auden fancies aphorists like Simone Weil and Charles Williams, neither to be found in Gross, and Gross has his pets – Sherrington, for instance, and Thomas Szasz, unknown to Auden. The earlier book has a useful thematic index, Gross’s has not. Gross is more specific about his sources. Both classify their ...”

“... unfortunate and now long-dead woman, from whose name HeLa is derived.* So why do we age? In 1952, Peter Medawar pointed out that until the middle of the 18th century most of our ancestors would have died from infections or injuries long before they were old enough to experience the effects of ageing. Genes that produced harmful effects late in life would ...”

“... a dozen Stevens texts pre-dating the Pisan Cantos and Paterson, while excluding Pound and Williams, the book seems more atavistic than Contemporary, and slanted into bias. Nothing in the objectivist or projective line is included. Olson is rejected, along with Dorn. A tradition of strong poetry, leading back through Stevens to Coleridge, Keats and ...”

“... which his father had once shown him; here the circle was complete.’ A sceptic might ask how Peter Ackroyd knows that Dickens’s face bore an infantile look in death? No one there seems to have recorded the fact. Was Ackroyd, like Scrooge, transported to the room by the spirit of biography past? How does Ackroyd know that Dickens’s final mental state ...”