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“... letters Kenner and Davenport sent each other over the course of 44 years, copiously annotated by Edward Burns and cross-referenced at the end of each year, begins, politely and a bit tentatively, in March 1958: ‘Dear Guy, I hope subsequent activities haven’t yet sufficed to obliterate our Boston dinner last fall from your memory.’ The two had ...”

“... that Crick ever set it. Nowhere is it more difficult to observe than in the matter of Robert Burns. Long ago, Edwin Muir said that ‘for a Scotsman to see Burns simply as a poet is almost impossible.’ Robert Crawford, himself an admired and graceful poet, writes on the closing page of The Bard that ‘...”

“... and has devoted herself since 1976 to preparing the first accurate editions of Stein’s works); Edward Burns, the editor of Staying on Alone: Letters of Alice B. Toklas, the Stein/Van Vechten correspondence and more recently (with Dydo) Stein’s correspondence with Thornton Wilder; and William Rice, a painter and actor in his seventies with a longtime ...”

“... Robert Burns wrote about art, friendship, religion, animals, drink, marriage and love. The First two and the last of these themes – poetry, sociability and sexual adventure, to call them by other names – commemorate activities which enabled him in youth, as did his drinking, to face the prospect of a lifetime’s hard labour on the land ...”

“... was probably 24. No one knows who wrote the text. Suggestions have ranged from Weelkes himself to Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. Thule, the period of cosmographie, Doth vaunt of Hecla whose sulphureous fire Doth melt the frozen clime and thaw the sky; Trinacrian Etna’s flames ascend not higher. These things seem wondrous, yet more wondrous I, Whose heart ...”

“... of secrets, whispers, unanswered telephones, Anne Frank’s house, Albert Schweitzer’s music, Edward Lear as ‘dream companion’. These are the kind of poems a good poet would write if his ‘one idea’ for the moment were that everything in the world wants to be a message. Rain in London wants to ‘whisper’. A shaken duster waves ...”

“... of Moral Sentiments and Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, nor even Burns’s Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect but William Robertson’s History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V of 1769, William Buchan’s Domestic Medicine of the same year, William Smellie’s 1771 Encyclopaedia Britannica and the five volumes of Hugh ...”

“... in his lifetime than Keats, with whom he shared a publisher). Clare was discovered in 1819, when Edward Drury, a young Stamford bookseller, wrote to his cousin John Taylor, who was also a bookseller – what we would now call a publisher – and told him that he had discovered a wholly untutored genius: Your hopes of good grammar and correct verse, depend ...”

“... 113 years, three months and 11 days.’ Thus the sleeper awakes, and begins – in the words of Edward Bellamy’s title – ‘looking backward’. Julian West had fallen asleep in the Boston of 1887, a city riven with poverty and industrial strife. He was now in a new Boston of peace and harmony, which was ticking away like well-oiled clockwork. It is ...”

“... cast light on civilisation by comparing what happens when blood is sold and when it is donated. Edward Bristow’s subject, likewise, is a service which may be either donated or traded – or obtained under duress. His exploration of it takes him into unfamiliar recesses of public and private depravity, and shines a torch into the laundry room of ...”

“... In the reign of Edward VI, an Exeter clergyman named William Herne, an enthusiast for the gospel, told one of the city’s aldermen that he would rather be torn apart by wild horses than ever again say the Catholic Mass. In December 1553, Queen Mary newly enthroned, the alderman entered his parish church to find Herne at the altar, in his old vestments and all ready to go ...”

“... of a true story’: the manhunt undertaken by Charles II’s restored government for two men, Edward Whalley and William Goffe. Their names appeared, alongside Ludlow’s, on Charles I’s death warrant in 1649. Whalley was a first cousin of Oliver Cromwell and his was the fourth signature on the warrant. Goffe, his son-in-law, was the fourteenth ...”

“... who took her provincial style in hand and then left her, to Oxford, to Aldermaston, and via Edward and Dorothy Thompson, to the watering hole of the New Left at the Partisan in Carlisle Street in Soho. It’s a fair geography of the early 1960s. People had begun wandering about, and unless you stayed put, you were bound to meet them. They were delighted ...”

“... in what it says but in when it was said. 1968 was the year in which it seemed necessary to warn Edward Heath against wandering too eagerly in the direction of Selsdon Park. Here is Blake on tariff reform: It has seldom paid for the Conservative Party to come forward as the party of change. That is not why people vote for it. The Conservatives can accept ...”

“... expect very little from books with titles like The Fortunate Traveller (Derek Walcott), Sun Poem (Edward Kamau Brathwaite), Aegean Islands (Bernard Spencer) and Sun the First (Odysseus Elytis). Walcott confronts this prejudice in his new volume. Dividing his poems into those set in exile in the ‘North’ (the United States and Britain) and those of the ...”