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“... edition of her Original Stories (for children), with an introduction by E.V. Lucas and five of the Blake plates reproduced. The other modern edition I acquired was called The Love Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, and had a biographical preface by Roger Ingpen. It was a reprint of Mary’s letters to her lover Gilbert Imlay, first published by Godwin among her ...”

“... a frogmarch, maybe even a toad’s march, to Pseud’s Corner even to bring up the name of William Blake, but historians of English madness, including Porter, help us see the Blakean contradictions: all those élitist mouthings-off about Reason, all that hypochondriacal cool, all those dancing lessons, all culminating, two hundred years later, in nonsense like ...”

“... mingles fearlessly with what is both contemporary and royal, stuffy and philistine. It is as if Blake were exulting in the family life of George III, or Goya’s genius revelling in paint with the gross King Ferdinand. Lion and Unicorn, Ape and Hyena, cavort with Falstaff and the corgis on the Fortieth Anniversary of the ...”

“... English poetry’. Hear the voice of the practitioner,’ Ricks enjoins in a provocative play on Blake. The voice of the anthologist – authoritative in tone, appositive in syntax – is heard here first in a stylishly stylised preface, next in a more tangential introduction vertebrated by a miniature anthology of elegant extracts from ‘our ...”

“... any other secondary authority. Some of these items are fairly slight, but even a short note on Blake and Reynolds, dating from 1957, makes a sharp and persuasive impact. One brief study, entitled ‘ “Borrowed Attitudes” in Reynolds and Hogarth’ (1938), is already a classic, though certain details can be challenged. Its central assertions remain ...”

“... a mock-gravity bordering on the hilarious. At the foot of an immensely long undergraduate essay on George Eliot, written by a friend of mine, he wrote, ‘Some good things here, I expect,’ a comment that was both a reproof and a vote of confidence, while at the same time managing to say everything about the sort of essays one should write on ...”

“... in his novels and poems as well as the more conventional sequence of biographies (Dickens, Blake, Thomas More) which preceded it. This vision is both conventionally literary and bracingly eccentric; as the constant repetitions and reiterations gather force, Ackroyd seems increasingly determined to disconcert the coffee-table end of his readership by ...”

“... the liberal Enlightenment, a politics from which this volume is not light-years remote. William Blake thought that art should not be too obvious in case it fell into the rationalist trap of false transparency; but he was also quick to see how cults of mystery were exploited by both priest and king to legitimate their power. There is no reason to assume that ...”

“... Europeans: Magritte, Dubuffet, Michaux, Bellmer, Klapheck. Britons: Bacon, Hamilton, Paolozzi, Blake, Harold Cohen, Riley, Caulfield, Gilbert and George. Kasmin’s Americans included Newman, Reinhardt, Stella, Noland, Louis, Frankenthaler, Olitski, Poons; his Britons, Caro, Tucker, Latham, Hill, Hockney, Richard ...”

“... epigram: the naturalness of young girls embodies for Lewis Carroll the Romantic ideal, present in Blake and Coleridge; for them, as Cohen points out, the child was a free spirit in a providential state of natural goodness (and possessed untrammelled innocence). Carroll met George MacDonald in Eastbourne in 1854, at the ...”

“... Jefferies was an enduring hero), and excitedly discovering writers. With Shakespeare, Blake was an early enthusiasm (everything was early in Sorley’s life); Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, he told his parents, was supposed to be the finest drama of modern times, with subtle tragic irony and so forth, ‘but I could only see in it a ...”

“... from Knight’s own. And what of his relations with conservative fellow patrons, men like Sir George Beaumont? Penny hints that they were sometimes fraught, alludes tantalisingly to a scene in 1798 when Knight had his pigtail publicly cut off by Lady Oxford, and provides one of those conclusions in which nothing is concluded. ‘[Uvedale] Price seems to ...”

“... to move them one way or the other. In that sense, ‘a tear is an intellectual thing,’ as Blake puts it in ‘The Grey Monk’. For the same reason, the history of weeping is a slippery enterprise. At the end of his immensely readable and often puckish exploration, Thomas Dixon sighs, with reason, that ‘it is impossible to pin tears down.’ Dixon ...”

“... about him as bard of a society in cancerous decline, harkening to the Muse of Death, like the George MacBeth who saw England as The Cleaver Garden or the Blake Morrison who heard The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper. Yet what sets Reading apart is that he has constantly signalled that he is fascinated as much by cut-ups ...”

“... as a male concubine to this Eastern Circe.’ That is the sort of career break the Flashman of George MacDonald Fraser could have taken in his stride, but Rohmer’s males have ‘a marked streak of puritanism’ in them, saying things like ‘I had never been a woman’s man’ or ‘I was never a squire of dames.’ Their ability to keep their minds on ...”