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“... various kinds including the gifted amateur Sir George Beaumont, Francis Chantry, John Constable, Thomas Lawrence, James Northcote and John Soane; and from the theatre, Jack Bannister, George Colman the younger, various Kembles, the long-deified Mrs Siddons and very many more. There were peers of the realm, baronets, famous churchmen, a duchess. One hundred ...”

“... most of human life has to disappear before he can do us a novel.’ Forster’s opinion of Hardy is much the same in the letters as in Aspects of the Novel, that Hardy is not a novelist at all but a poet. But there is nothing in the letters to sustain the notion, in Aspects, that the flaw of ...”

“... and unexpected by the poet, which reveals itself in the most characteristic poems of Edward Thomas, is wholly absent from the world of his poetry. So is the sense of easing himself, in the expression of grief or pleasure, which is natural to Hardy. No word could be less suitable for these Lowell effects than ...”

“... wonderful bucolic address, backed up by a traditional railway pub and a vine-draped cottage out of Thomas Hardy. The cottage and the titular angel path would be illegally obliterated, with posthumous apologies, at the great Olympic moment in 2012. Chobham Farm workers, soon to be picketed by the dockers whose territory they were invading, were paid, by ...”

“... The longer answer is that ‘in the early chapters of their autobiographies, Coleridge, Hardy, Yeats, Sassoon, Graves, Day Lewis, Spender and MacNeice have a good deal to say about the external circumstances of their family lives, but little about their internal or “writerly” lives.’ That is true, though some of these poets have left us ...”

“... feedback’: Auden brings back forms and metres ‘in chic contemporary guise’; Dylan Thomas causes ‘a blockage against intelligence’; even ‘the Movement’ itself – the incisively intelligent ‘academic-administrative’ verses of Larkin, Wain and Enright – could not help endorsing the most negative feedback of all – English ...”

“... certain annihilation. Very few creatures persist for long in evolutionary time. There are a few hardy survivors, like the cockroach (which has remained unchanged for tens of millions of years), but for most, extinction follows quite soon after origin. This sad fact has been neglected by biologists, who, being – in general – optimists, are far more ...”

“... of the threat posed by ‘the man’ (unnamed until later) the novel begins as explosively as Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, where Michael Henchard puts his wife up for sale. Eilis understands where the man is coming from, as if his belligerence were a tribal norm: ‘She had known men like this in Ireland. Should one of them discover ...”

“... he once informed an inquirer. It’s no surprise he professed himself ‘grieved’ by his friend Hardy’s pessimism, as he told Edmund Gosse, a judgment that Gosse did not hesitate to pass on to Hardy, adding spryly: ‘I wonder whether you were not saddened by his optimism? There is something to me almost flighty in his ...”

“... a strong line over questions of definition and evaluation; and each contains much to applaud. Thomas Kinsella’s New Oxford Book goes right back to the beginning, to a rath in front of an oak wood singled out for comment by some anonymous poet of the sixth century, and cherished as a survival from an even more distant past, while the Faber book takes as ...”

“... much happens in Suffolk, or if it did then it happened a long time ago. ‘Very quiet here,’ Hardy wrote to his sister from Aldeburgh. ‘Whole town rather solitary,’ Carlyle said. (These details are lifted from Ronald Blythe’s The Time by the Sea: Aldeburgh 1955-58, an account of years spent with Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears and E.M. Forster on the ...”

“... and eloquently, declared in his ‘Art poétique’ of 1874. The line must have lodged in Edward Thomas’s mind: in May 1914, some six months before his late efflorescence into verse at the age of 36, he wrote to Robert Frost of his longing to ‘wring all the necks of my rhetoric – the geese’. He was referring to the over-elaborate style of some of his ...”

“... and sent to the House of Correction in Brixton for fourteen days. Up for the second time, Thomas Cooper was alleged to have stolen a machine for sweeping chimneys which belonged to John Deaton, and was committed for trial. James Ryall, John Burridge, John White and Thomas Wall were re-examined for passing ...”

“... chapter makes no mention of the alternative line of Dickens biography that descends through Thomas Wright and Katherine Longley to our contemporaries Peter Ackroyd and Claire Tomalin. In his chapter on James Joyce Hamilton dwells exclusively on the author’s ‘patron saint’, Harriet Weaver. Surprisingly – for a study whose main concern is the ...”

“... Thomas Carlyle was quite fond of the Chartists – until they opened their mouths. In an essay on Chartism published in 1839, the Sage of Chelsea harangued the political establishment and spoke up for the stoic dignity of the English working man: ‘Chartism with its pikes, Swing with his tinder box,’ he wrote, ‘speak a most loud though inarticulate language ...”