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“... department. Wain made friends elsewhere in the university, among them the celebrated typographer William McCance. It was McCance who hand-printed those pretty little volumes of verse, including Wain’s own first collection, Mixed Feelings, and Amis’s second, A Frame of Mind, now, I gather, much sought after. Wain was a friend, a sincere admirer and ...”

“... Howard Fitzwilliam of London. A second entry announced the forthcoming nuptials of Edmund Arthur William Mortimer of Liverpool and the same plain Jane Austen of Steventon. These entries show her practising for her future profession, as well as indulging in a different sort of fantasy about who she might be when she grew up. When Coleridge turned against ...”

“... art. Reading Gaston, I was reminded repeatedly of paintings by Lawrence Alma-Tadema and John William Waterhouse. Pater’s interest in these works might help us to understand their appeal not only to his contemporaries, but to audiences today. Queen Margaret of Navarre is first mentioned in the novel with a Greek quotation that links her to Homer’s ...”

“... by invoking three poets in a tone which unintentionally flatters and patronises:        Wordsworth who fills The stern mould of all Westmorland hills; Hardy too, haunting his Wessex ways, A pastoral order dying in his gaze, and William Yeats – a ‘stubborn and age-angry man’ – who laughed ‘with rod and ...”

“... fortifies my soul to know/That, though I perish, Truth is so.’ You must feel uneasy at William James’s claim that ‘ideas ... become true just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relations with other parts of our experience.’ You must become indignant when Ryan (accurately paraphrasing Dewey) says that ‘to call a statement ...”

“... the associations are fairly simple to spot, as in his response to the death of the child Kate Wordsworth, or, more notoriously, to Ann of Oxford Street, and other young outcast girls and ‘pariahs’. Having stolen into the room where his dead sister lay, De Quincey reports that he fancied he heard a footstep on the stair, whereupon he kissed the girl ...”

“... in operatic performances in England’. Here and there are flashes of the later Shaw. He describes William Carter’s cantata, Placida, as ‘eminently inoffensive. It constantly refreshes the listener with reminiscences of familiar masters.’ A little later, Wagner’s overture to Tannhäuser holds the audience seated ‘despite the loss of the express at ...”

“... Eliot’s fingerprints are all over this book). There is a dream of a music lesson taught by William Byrd, a history of English poetry in the manner of one of Blake’s prophetic books, and a perambulation of London in which Hogarth repeats passages of The Analysis of Beauty and marches Timothy through the scenes of his engravings of London life. Most ...”

“... Lowell and Berryman, whose work shows in every line, have had the attention they deserve, while William Carlos Williams has been slighted or ignored. Frank O’Hara, like Eliot, inherited two traditions, one American, the other French. Although he says, half-serious, ‘of the American poets only Whitman and Crane and Williams are better than the ...”

“... had to compete with multiple attractions, for which Hahn finds the appropriate quotation in Wordsworth: albinos, painted Indians, dwarfs, The horse of knowledge, and the learned pig, The stone-eater, the man that swallows fire, Giants, ventriloquists, the invisible girl, The bust that speaks and moves its goggling eyes There was also a powerful ...”

“... having his arse shot off. I just note that he didn’t’; ‘when you compare Graves with Wordsworth or Rilke you are comparing a rearrangement of the room with a subsidence of continents’; of the 1987 hurricane to a contributor in California: ‘every second tree in the square is on its knees’). In that sense he was the object of a cult of an ...”

“... William Godwin is a man who cries out to be the subject of a life. He has everything: a repressed personality, ripe for psychoanalysis; a role in the high dramas of his wife Mary Wollstonecraft, his daughter Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, his son-in-law Shelley and the infant grandchildren; a circle of interesting friends, many of them articulate enough to leave written records, and famous enough to have their letters preserved ...”

“... in the DNB from beyond the grave. Also excluded from the original edition were, for example, William Jardine and Sir James Matheson, the founders of the famous company which bear their name. Their refusal to agree to Chinese requests to desist from the opium trade led to the disgraceful Opium War of 1840-2, a war which Jardine suggested could be brought ...”

“... entertaining’, but this is ambiguous: he may have meant that Russell was a figure of fun, like William Boot. When Russell died in 1947 he was described in the Times as ‘that most endearing of Somerset farmers’ – the best tribute they could come up with. Russell was ever a countryman, proud of his mangels: raised in rural Surrey, he was discomposed in ...”

“... by the 19th-century forgers were more sophisticated, though less celebrated, than those with which William Henry Ireland in the previous century had deceived James Boswell and many others, though not the great Shakespearean Edmond Malone (himself guilty of tampering with manuscripts). The men of this new age were scholars, working in a tradition often said to ...”