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“... much more unstable and challenging model – Shakespeare. The process is fairly familiar, but R.S. White, the author of two excellent books on Shakespearean romance and tragedy, has examined it in detail and come up with a host of fresh examples and insights. His book makes a good complement to John Barnard’s more general but also innovative study in the new ...”

“... of recent time, I bought Thomas’s book, bought it without benefit of either review or browse. A rash move, and the beginning of the unlucky relationship referred to above: a relationship which has only grown more perplexing as Thomas’s reputation has, as it undoubtedly has, grown. Remembering my feelings in those early days, they were initially a matter ...”

“... the other egotistical, immodest and boring. The longer the performance goes on, the greater is the risk of the second. ‘Out for the Elements’ is a fine technical achievement, remarkably sustained though a third too long. But Waterman’s register is less refined and more violent than his original. Though it has an impressive suppleness of movement, the ...”

“... why ‘swallow equals anchor’: ‘the likeness is not wholly gratuitous since cloud also equals white ship, or sailing ship – allowing a coherent image. But, anchor equals stability and moorings, and swallow is equally an image of the swift and fleeting – as cloud is an image of the drifting, dissolving, and passing, of all things.’ Finlay is not much ...”

“... of the idea for a title as by the accident of The Waste Land’s being too short: those spare white pages left when the text was first set for printing needed, like the Grail itself, to be filled with something, and the famous notes were the answer. Wagner saw the Grail as a symbol that sacramentalised art itself – though all he could think to do with ...”

“... he says of Byron; and of Dickinson, no less winningly: ‘She was reclusive, tended to wear white clothing, which was thought odd, and scarcely left her bedroom in her later years.’ Such things strike a whimsical note, but usually Carey’s humour has a flintier edge. It is, for example, difficult to miss the disdain in a description of Stephen ...”

“... up the beck. Not a rare bird, the heron’s size is never less than spectacular, and grey and white though they are they still seem exotic. Bitterly cold with snow forecast later so we get off early up the M6 to Penrith and Brampton, hoping to have a look at the Written Rock, a quarry by the river at Brampton with an inscription carved by the legion that ...”

“... family doctor, Bob Boothby and Father Christmas all rolled into one. He was stout and beaming with white hair and bushy white eyebrows. He wore a black jacket and a waistcoat, and striped trousers like a faithful old family retainer, or Lord Reith. Ronnie knew how to fix anything – tickets for the Cup Final, a box at ...”

“... greatest experience of political disadvantage and unrest. Black poets here are less reluctant than white to give vent to their frustrations – they don’t recognise didacticism as a ‘problem’. Nor does Tom Paulin, who as a critic is much concerned with British and Irish politics, and as a poet mixes references to B-Specials with words like glooby and ...”

“... and upper-middle class mad could live in a world of mock-domesticity. Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White is only the tip of the iceberg. Part of Charles Lamb’s greatness must be that he never wanted to bury his own family disaster in this way, to earn respectability by shuffling off responsibility. One of the houses that Lamb made into a haven for his sister ...”

“... reveals herself as plump and well-fed, possibly pregnant. She hangs around for a bit, shoving her white nose through the trellis on top of the wall before disappearing next door. Meanwhile the wreath-laying has started, which I’m always impressed by. In the unlikely event of my being asked to lay a wreath at the Cenotaph I’d have to decline, if only ...”

“... discovery of the Romantic poets continues to be made. What Coleridge put in a notebook – the white dung of a hawk falling from the sky, the shadows cast on urine by candlelight – could and can go into poetry, along with the wasp trying to get out of the window, a menstrual problem, buying veal, what a husband thought the wife said, what she felt he ...”