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“... Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound; Donne’s Biathanatos and ‘Satire III’; the ‘Hail Mary’; Psalm 143; Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy; Eliot’s Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F.H. Bradley and The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism; Swinburne’s ‘A Leave-Taking’; Pater’s The Renaissance. Perhaps any editor might ...”

“... predicaments with a cold eye and ‘cool brains’ (in the prescription of the Civil War diarist Mary Chesnut). And the defeat of 1865 merely confirmed their prescience about the instability of people, places and things. The American South, in O’Brien’s telling, learned a lesson in defeat that would not reach Europe for fifty years. O’Brien has a ...”

“... Poets”!’ he wrote to Emily Hale in February 1933, halfway through his year as Charles Eliot Norton professor at Harvard. The lecture included the following considerations (transcribed by his brother Henry):The desire to write a letter, to put down what you don’t want anybody else to see but the person you are writing to, but which yet you do not want ...”

“... regarding ‘real life’ has been made by Edith Wharton’s most direct heir (in this matter), Mary McCarthy, Miss McCarthy’s brilliant essay ‘The Fact in Fiction’ – published some twenty years ago, though her argument is to some extent continued and amplified in her recent Ideas and the Novel – revived the earlier writer’s question in a far ...”

“... as his idol. Lewes actually wrote a biography of Shelley, encouraged by Leigh Hunt, though not by Mary Shelley. It was never published, he himself soon deciding it was a poor piece of work, and it disappeared. I have always regretted this lost book, but Professor Ashton convinces us that Lewes’s low opinion of it was the right one. It was, however, a ...”

“... could use the law as ruthlessly as predatory males. Indeed, they could sometimes be the predators. Mary Stenson, an heiress from the minor gentry, seems to have trifled with the affections and the bodies of two men in the 1650s and 1660s, before marrying a third. They sued, but she won. Twenty years later, Mary Cudworth, the ...”

“... than more powerful productions.’ Felicia Hemans was huge in America, where Andrews Norton (Charles Eliot Norton’s father) offered her a prestigious job editing a literary periodical in Boston, which she turned down. Despite speaking five languages she never left the British Isles. Nor did she ever stop ...”

“... biography which somewhat delicately halted its narrative in 1903-4, with Berenson and his wife Mary returned from a head-hunting trip to the United States, where the big-game of major-league millionaires – Peter Widener, James G. Johnson, Samuel Kress – had leapt to profit from his publicised expertise. This was sometimes prompted by motives of ...”

“... herself to blame. Yes, she had been subject to an estranging and neglectful childhood: her mother, Mary (née Coates), supposedly tried to abort her by swallowing turpentine in the last months of her pregnancy; her grifter father, the feckless Jay B. Plangman, vanished when she was an infant. (When she met him at seventeen, he seems to have shown her a stash ...”

“... is to the fore in annotations such as the one with which he glosses the lines ‘To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours/With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine’: ‘A phenomenon which I have often noticed.’ At times he seems almost to be taunting the philistine English poetry-lover who can’t see beyond the Georgians, as when he recommends ...”

“... element in his relationship with Jean Verdenal. Lyndall Gordon reports a conversation with Mary Trevelyan which makes him seem mildly amused about this imputation, but his first reaction was quick and indignant. After his death the sanction of his disapproval no longer worked, and almost anything goes.* Now that so much has been said it seems ...”

“... year 1964-65, when he was a young apprentice academic and Lewis was the visiting Charles Eliot Norton Professor: the differences in age and culture and experience somehow worked to kindle the regard and friendship we instantly felt for each other and found in each other. I was beginning to study the American poetic tradition, and it was daunting and ...”

“... seem likely that this autumn we will be shooting The Lady in the Van. This is the story of Miss Mary Shepherd, the elderly eccentric who took up residence in my garden in 1974, living there in a van until her death 15 years later. Maggie Smith played Miss Shepherd on the stage in 1999 and all being well will star in the film with Nicholas Hytner ...”

“... with 12 bridesmaids and an officiating canon who was ‘the second husband of my great-aunt Mary Chamberlain, Uncle Joe’s third wife’. As a Parliamentary candidate her least fashionable constituency was to be Birmingham King’s Norton, which she nursed for seven difficult years. The two elections which she ...”

“... told her she mustn’t expect him to be faithful), he had some sort of affair with her sister Mary; then he was seriously involved with Violet Hunt, a fashionable novelist and by all accounts a very alarming woman. When she called herself Mrs Hueffer (Ford’s original surname) she was at once sued by Elsie, who would never consent to a divorce: Ford ...”