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“... from a mast’, that ‘lineage of joy’.1946 was in fact the year in which Larkin read Thomas Hardy’s ‘Thoughts of Phena’ and experienced a literary conversion, ‘complete and permanent’. Hardy rescued him from Yeats, just as Yeats – three years earlier – had captured him from Auden. Under the ...”

“... in the previous history of womankind.’ Opposition came, strangely, from the liberal scientist Thomas Henry Huxley. In reply to a telegram from Herbert Spencer asking support for the burial, Huxley wrote:   It can hardly be doubted that the proposal will be bitterly opposed, possibly with the raking up of past histories, which had better be ...”

“... forenoone knell of the great bell’. Such details help to anchor the lyrics empirically and, as Thomas Hardy endlessly shows, such random, discrete facts are essential to our need to imagine experience. Annotating Shakespeare’s meditation in sonnet 68 on ageing and the means used to disguise it, Duncan-Jones notes that wigs and false hair must often ...”

“... not subject to malicious misinterpretation, may be a virtue, not to say a survival skill. As Thomas Hardy put it: ‘Aspects are within us; and who seems/Most kingly is the King.’Many of the same questions recur with Mars – once more it is tempting (though unprovable) to think of the god and the fabulist looking at one another across the ...”

“... in a poem about a working man he’d seen in the lane on leaving Lamb House. He stays with Thomas Hardy in 1923, but blames himself for ‘snobbery’ in wanting to see him; the droll brief entry contrasts strongly with the six pages of Woolf’s diary describing a much shorter visit to the Hardys three years later, one of the most vivid ...”

“... the early orchestral recordings, with their patchy intonation. Elgar, Adrian Boult, Henry Wood, Thomas Beecham: the gentleman-conductors held sway, stiff and upholstered on the podium, their white moustaches like frozen waterfalls, their batons cocked like riding crops. Elgar famously told the teenaged Yehudi Menuhin, who was about to record his Violin ...”

“... The English have never been unduly admiring of their own great men. All of Thomas Carlyle’s efforts failed to establish Oliver Cromwell securely in the Victorian pantheon. The names of Lord Nelson and the Duke of Wellington summon up public houses rather than heroes. Winston Churchill in this century, like the Elder Pitt in the 18th and the Younger Pitt in the 19th, was buried with ceremony then swiftly consigned to history: which means that for the bulk of the population he became irrelevant ...”

“... Kingsley Amis called Dylan Thomas’s life, the life told by Thomas’s first thorough biographer Paul Ferris, ‘a hilarious, shocking, sad story’. Thomas was very important to the Amis-Larkin club partly because he seemed determined not to be seen to be taking anything, including himself, too seriously ...”

“... The Queen smiled back at the unsmiling Sir Kevin. ‘Norman is so cheeky. Now we’ve read Dylan Thomas, haven’t we, and some John Cowper Powys. And Jan Morris we’ve read. But who else is there?’ ‘You could try Kilvert, maam,’ said Norman. ‘Who’s he?’ ‘A vicar, maam. Nineteenth century. Lived on the Welsh borders and wrote a diary. Fond of ...”

“... Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity) and, for all the expiring heroes in their novels, neither Hardy nor the Brontës had any use for the phrase. It was certainly in existence in the Victorian era, appearing in the Christian World of 19 June 1884, where reference is made to ‘a stiff, starched Order of Service’, and it crops up in depictions of funerals ...”

“... there is nothing of that here), while social reformers made it a persuasive one. In Thomas Annan’s Close No. 118 High Street, from an album produced in the late 1800s for the Glasgow City Improvement Trust, a group of inhabitants pack the end of a narrow alley as though swept down it the way rubbish is swept down a gutter. Such ...”

“... the remains were conveyed to Aberystwith, where the interment takes place to-day. The Rev. W. Hardy Harwood let the Union Chapel congregation know that ‘on the day of his death Mr Roberts had written him a letter saying that he found Florence more beautiful than ever.’ One purpose of this announcement, presumably, was to allay any suspicions of ...”

“... at all. And she is good at describing that great tradition of our literature, from Caedman to R.S. Thomas, which transforms the parochial into the universal. A highly literate Church has not limited itself to the Word, but has scribbled its brilliant way into drama, poetry, science and fiction. Miss Drabble’s map is sign-posted all over with cloisters and ...”

“... The shift may have been helped by phonetic ambiguities: the saint graal, ‘Sankgreall’ in Sir Thomas Malory’s spelling, the ‘holy vessel’, leached into the sang réal, ‘royal blood’. The Holy Grail was the vessel that had preserved the Holy Blood. Europe, however, was awash with holy blood – Hailes Abbey had a highly efficacious sample – and ...”

“... we knew his story as we knew the life of Nelson or St George. There was no such moving image for Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s bulldog (or Rottweiler) as there is not for Nelson’s Hardy or St George’s horse; the acts of the chief apostle are not celebrated. We know Huxley as a photograph or a cartoon: heavy-jawed and ...”