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“... Efforts on both sides to distinguish the enemy doctrine from the enemy people came to nothing. Lord Sheffield called France ‘the vilest of all nations’, and Robespierre replied in kind: ‘In my capacity as a Frenchman, a representative of the people, I declare that I hate the English people.’ It was only a short step to Barère’s call for ...”

“... up.The daisy chain continued to get longer: in 1901 Olive Custance – who eventually eloped with Lord Alfred Douglas – had affairs with both Barney and Vivien. A year later Vivien met Baroness Hélène van Zuylen, nicknamed ‘La Brioche’ for the way she curled her hair, and started an affair. Barney became jealous, dubbed van Zuylen a fat Valkyrie, and ...”

“... The High Court can order one, as it did recently on the Hillsborough disaster. Of that case Lord Judge, then lord chief justice, held that ‘it seems to us elementary that the emergence of fresh evidence which may reasonably lead to the conclusion that the substantial truth about how an individual met his death was ...”

“... as an assassin. You don’t bring in a 37-year-old woman to review John Updike in the year of our Lord 2019 unless you’re hoping to see blood on the ceiling. ‘Absolutely not,’ I said when first approached, because I knew I would try to read everything, and fail, and spend days trying to write an adequate description of his nostrils, and all I would be ...”

“... who parodies the Martian approach so successfully that you wonder if it has quite enough to it. Blake Morrison’s ‘Xerox’ is a poem to be memorised now if you did not cut it out of the paper and keep it, but he already had a reputation so anyone might have printed it. Fiona Pitt-Kethley, however, was little known until the LRB started printing her ...”

“... his work, Kathleen Raine wrote, is ‘like standing under a waterfall in full spate’. Like Blake or Stanley Spencer, Redgrove was a great English visionary eccentric whose way of seeing mixed sexuality with a powerful sense of ritual. Born in Kingston upon Thames in 1932, he spent most of his boyhood in a newly built detached suburban house. Its ...”

“... taught at Berkeley, Heaney writes to Michael Longley: ‘stupid, illiterate, long-haired, hippie, Blake-ridden, Ginsberg-gullible, assholes (assholes or cunts, I hear you cry). Seriously though, it is an exhausting assignment with a lot of anxious and eager kids all wanting to hear they’re the greatest thing since, say, Charles Olson.’ This might be ...”

“... have gone before (‘And’ was not unprecedented as a first word, but it is enduringly strange: Blake used it in ‘Jerusalem’ and Pound in the Cantos). The first line of Astraea Redux is similarly assertive and uncertain about ‘now’: ‘Now with a general peace the world was blessed.’ In this case, the unsettling is done by ‘was’. This ...”

“... rather than as corroborations or illustrations of an argument. The two pages given up to Lord Carrington’s reminiscences of his wartime experiences as a Guards officer (an ex-Foreign Secretary who in his interview apparently had not a word to say about Williams) can only be explained by the fact that Inglis has rather a thing about the ...”

“... is quiet. This working pattern sparked a lengthy court case, Royal Mencap Society v. Tomlinson-Blake, with workers seeking a ruling that they were, in fact, working and therefore entitled to be paid at least the minimum wage for the whole shift; some care homes warned that, if awarded, back pay (estimated at £400 million) would bankrupt them. Key ...”

“... Philip Roth and William Styron had pinned up above their desks a famous Flaubert aphorism, which Blake Bailey quotes in his Roth biography: ‘Be orderly and regular in your life, like a bourgeois, so that you may be wild and original in your work.’ It is a wonderful, uplifting quote, even if the translation seems to be a little adapted. ‘Violent’ or ...”

“... reading on a working day, so he climbed over the high wall round Burghley Park. Like the young Blake seeing a tree full of angels in the fields at Peckham Rye, this moment is part of literary folklore: ‘What with reading the book,’ Clare wrote in his autobiography, ‘and beholding the beauties of artful nature in the park, I got into a strain of ...”

“... but as neurosis, emotional repression, the inability to love: there is much more D.H. Lawrence and Blake in them than there is Mr Marx. And of course a lot of Freud, mostly not in particulars but in the diffusely Freudian cast of mind – the ‘climate of opinion’, in Auden’s famous phrase – which, contemplating the whole range of human damage, finds ...”

“... And heard in the churchyard a biblical echo. “In the year that King Uzziah died I saw also the Lord …”’ If her lines are unusually memorable, it is because they scan: first the sea, then the Bible, then the whole of English literature.It was the weight of influence that sat so heavily on the Leavis generation. A teacher, for those symbolic eleven ...”

“... and beautifully is in the order of poetry,’ the Greenock-born journalist and novelist George Blake wrote. ‘The pride of a seafaring nation and of a shipbuilding race were utterly engaged. This mass of metal had become the symbol of national self-respect. To leave her unfinished would have been as unthinkable as, shall we say, to scuttle half the ...”