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“... years, Malamud has been championed by a new generation of Jewish-American writers. Dara Horn, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jonathan Lethem and Jonathan Rosen have all written loving introductions to his novels, and sometimes it seems that what they most admire about them is all the ...”

“... Hazlitt has a modern feel about him. Among the poets of his age, dying young or turning, like Wordsworth, into pillars of the establishment, he represents a kind of muddling through, an honesty baffled and contingent, inconsistent even; not living in the world of romantic ideals and simplifying gestures but ground in the daily mill of intrigue and accommodation ...”

“... famous account in the Biographia Literaria of how a government agent spied on him and Wordsworth in Somerset in 1796 and misheard ‘Spinoza’ as ‘Spy Nozy’, but ‘could not catch a word about politics’. Morrison’s persona is a spy; like Browning’s poet, he is an outsider, an inquisitor. For a time he was a schoolteacher, but was ...”

“... Bishop Audley’s is early 16th century, a happy intruder, far from ‘in keeping’. Bishop Wordsworth, great-nephew of the poet, is commemorated by George Frampton in white marble, supine, fingers intertwined as though sleeping off a heavy lunch. He is almost as dead as the supposedly living figures painted by Frampton’s son, Meredith, now in the ...”

“... to me so deeply because those who wander thus are my own favourite poets: Ovid, Ariosto, Spenser, Wordsworth, Shelley, Clare – and, interpreting ‘poets’ generously, Constable, Thoreau, Conrad, Calvino and Frank Lloyd Wright, whose Fallingwater is Harrison’s model house, built on the Ruskinian principle of ‘not only coming to rest in its environment ...”

“... Jonathan Raban is afraid of the sea, saying it is not his element, which is probably why he spends so much time on it. He does not claim to be a world-class sailor, though he is obviously a competent one. One good reason for sailing is that, being a writer, he likes to write about having sailed. Sailing is guaranteed to provide alarms and achievements for his pen to celebrate ...”

“... 18th-century sonneteer – a somewhat obscure poet who nevertheless wrote four lines so good that Wordsworth appropriated them for a sonnet of his own (‘How sad a welcome!’). Pennington considered that work of such ‘compact excellence’ deserved universal fame, though a satisfactory second-best would be the esteem of ‘the few lovers of good ...”

“... of facts all obtaining in a single moment. For some reason Laocoön caught on in England: Dorothy Wordsworth read it with pleasure, and Henry Fuseli lectured on it at the Royal Academy and persuaded William Blake to take an interest. George Eliot admired its style (‘the most un-German of all German books that I have ever read’), de Quincey translated ...”

“... use of historical imagination to reveal a hidden identity between the present and the remote past. Wordsworth, walking across Salisbury Plain, pictured the Druids of Stonehenge as ‘long-bearded teachers’ – remote ancestors, in fact, of the English poets. Books on Irish literature and culture almost invariably find themselves embodying (or ...”

“... poet’s richly particularised voice is largely a way of giving tongue to the transcendent. From Wordsworth to D.H. Lawrence, one speaks most persuasively when one articulates what is not oneself, whether one calls this Nature or the creative imagination, the primary processes or the dark gods. The self runs down to unfathomably anonymous roots. Men and ...”

“... around 1770, when Gainsborough was living in Bath. For many years, the sitter was identified as Jonathan Buttall, the son of a London ironmonger who owned the painting until the mid-1790s. But more recent evidence suggests it may be a portrait of Gainsborough’s nephew, Gainsborough Dupont, who lived with him and worked as his assistant.The dimensions are ...”

“... with Dorn. A tradition of strong poetry, leading back through Stevens to Coleridge, Keats and Wordsworth is implied. Up to a point this will help the anthology appeal to English readers. It certainly makes a better Faber Book than its American manifestation does a Harvard Book. But anyone looking for the full range of post-war US poetry will have to turn ...”

“... for fly-fishing and bird-watching, his long weekends in Hampshire, his occasional quotations from Wordsworth. A famous photograph shows him in country clothes with a robin perched on his hat. This lifelong rusticity led many to label him an insular amateur of limited ambition. As incoming prime minister in 1905, Henry Campbell-Bannerman was reluctant to make ...”

“... examples, Manning traces the provincialising of Calvinist attitudes in the writings of David Hume, Jonathan Edwards, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson, among others. Far from a mechanical application of rigid doctrinal categories, Manning’s thoughtful critique shows how contradictory attitudes can arise out of, and in reaction to, a common ...”

“... is also part of a vigorous poetic and critical counter-culture. His work sends critics to Blake or Wordsworth or Coleridge as often as it propels them to the OED in search of what Beckett called ‘semantic succour’; it is as likely to draw us back to the Metaphysical poets, to Hardy or to Herrick as it is to refer us to Heidegger, Bakhtin or Adorno. It was ...”