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“... often pass over this poem, though it gets a sensible if fleeting comment in the new book by Gifford and Roberts. But Hughes’s heroic imagination is not often exercised on ‘heroes’ of the warrior sort, ancient or modern. It is usually displaced, if that is the word, to animals or to inanimate ‘cosmic’ forces, thus neutralising the awkward ...”

“... When John Muir, the son of an emigrant from East Lothian to southern Wisconsin, was 16, in 1855, his father lowered him daily down a well shaft on their new farm at Hickory Hill. John cut with chisel and hammer through fine-grained sandstone until he struck ‘a fine, hearty gush of water’. By then he had dinted his way through eighty feet of rock, working alone from dawn till dark ...”

“... Hardy has already reached his 72nd year. From the year 1870, in which Hardy met Emma Lavinia Gifford and finished his first published novel, only one letter survives. We can only guess at what has vanished, but it was probably more revealing than what has survived. This extreme unevenness of coverage is not at all unusual: in R.W. Chapman’s edition of ...”