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“... mystery and unresolved tensions remain right to the end of the book, to the concluding question mark. The narrative, if that is what it is, conveys a pervasive Romantic-religious sense of wonder which survives Romantic misery (the Werther-like ‘Sorrows of Teufelsdröckh’), the collapse of self-sufficiency and romantic love and dogmatic certainties. The ...”

“... factor in social stratification was noted by historians, but class was the exciting issue. Engel begins in 1800, the year in which Oxford established its famous honours schools examination, a departure from historical precedent which is not yet fully understood. The new examinations revivified teaching. Instruction now had a specific as well as a wider ...”

“... foremost a Shakespeare scholar. He had caught the bug while studying at Columbia in the 1930s with Mark Van Doren, who took the rather troubled young man under his wing and excited him about literature, Shakespeare especially. When Lowell and his then wife, Jean Stafford, invited the Berrymans to their summer home in Maine in 1946, everyone got on ...”