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“... also revived folk-song festivals, a weapon already used against Tsarism – hence the title of Clare Thomson’s book. It was the rumour that the Prague police had clubbed a student to death that spelt the end of the Husak regime: Civic Forum’s twin in Slovakia is called Public Against Violence. It was the threat of the East German regime to crush ...”

“... In 1865, a year after John Clare’s death in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, Frederick Martin, a former amanuensis of Thomas Carlyle, published the first biography of the ‘peasant poet’. It laid the foundations, Jonathan Bate says in his new Life, ‘for both the enduring myths and some of the key truths about Clare ...”

“... of ordinariness diverts any readers from the prose of the early 19th-century labourer-poet John Clare, as rooted a resident of his native Helpston in Northamptonshire as Turner was of East Hoathly in Sussex. Clare was not so sustained a diarist as Turner, but he kept a Journal for a year in 1824-5, which Anne Tibble and ...”

“... be possible to produce a book like this without some reference to the idyll and the anti-idyll – Thomson on one side, and Crabbe on the other. Miss Drabble is far more robust and far less mealy-mouthed than most on the subject, and she sharply condemns the cruel fantasies of the Pastoral. She writes magnificently about ...”

“... restores the analysis of syntax to its rightful place in exegesis. Later chapters on Milton, Thomson, Clare and Wordsworth unfold an intriguing argument about the poetic effects of delaying a main verb: the pace at which readers are obliged to hurry through the ‘deferred syntax’ of Milton’s heroic sonnets is ...”

“... firm came in to do glass and tiles. Soon he had a separate office and had turned aesthete. Greek Thomson, the Glasgow classicist, encountered him at dinner in 1871, where Scott ‘made his appearance in black knee breeks black silk stockings high heeled shoes with large buckles, blue coat, yellow vest white neck cloth with stiffner and frilled shirt – he ...”

“... in scope and emphasis, so it is well worthwhile to read them both. Benjamin Lipscomb is American; Clare Mac Cumhaill is Irish and Rachael Wiseman is British. His book covers a longer time span, and goes more deeply into the philosophical controversies in which the four were engaged, particularly the transformation in moral philosophy that began with a revolt ...”

“... of the game (to be bent, broken and ignored) and the ferocity of the play remained the same. Roy Thomson, benign among proprietors, has come and gone, picking up a peerage in the process. So has Victor Matthews, moving from building-site to Fleet Street and out again in less than ten years. The free or cut-price offers of dictionaries and flower-pots in the ...”

“... fare. ‘All of this,’ he noted, ‘happened in front of Edmund Wilson and his wife, Virgil [Thomson], Mrs Otto Kahn and poor Lady Ribblesdale.’ What happened to Capote, as he began to visualise In Cold Blood in Kansas in 1959 and 1960, is immensely complex. The story of how he manipulated his sources is a godsend both to moralists and to those ...”