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“... or to future generations the overflowings of [my] mind ...’ The passage is quoted both by Paul Dawson and Claire Tomalin, and I can give no better indication of the different styles and standpoints of their two books than by reproducing their comments on it. Dr Dawson, whose work is a detailed, scholarly study of ...”

“... of psychodrama, involving rituals of expulsion and exorcism and ultimate destruction.’ P.M.S. Dawson argues that ‘Leavis’s criticism is inherently conservative, and insidiously so in the way that ideological demands are disguised as critical principles.’ But the pressure of literary theory seems particularly regrettable in David Lodge’s essay on ...”

“... 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’. Though there have been other biographies since Martin’s, Bate’s should finally disprove Dickens’s dismissal of it as a ‘preposterous exaggeration of small claims’, and consolidate Clare’s reputation as a major Romantic poet (it’s strange to remember that he was much more successful in his lifetime than Keats, with whom he shared a publisher ...”