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“... the tower itself. Auden had a beady eye for the laxity of self-indulgence, even when, as occurs in Hardy’s poems, it is a part of their personal engagingness. ‘I never cared for life: life cared for me,’ writes Hardy, and Auden commented: ‘What – never? Come, come, Mr ...”

“... had to put it back in. Greek, however, was even less accessible than Latin in an England where, as Thomas More calculated in 1533, only about half the population could read even their own language. Erasmus, like the founder of sacred comparative philology, Lorenzo Valla in Italy in the 1440s, annotated his text in Latin; he also supplied a Latin ...”

“... limits are his medium. Many of these poems are ponderings of historical events and personages – Thomas Müntzer, George III, the Battle of Jutland – written as if to make peace with them by understanding them. In these poems the poet’s mind is indeed turned outward: his interest in other people is disinterested, and he prefers ‘we’ to ‘I’, and ...”

“... Auden). They will dictate to puppet biographers the ‘true’ story of their lives (like Hardy or Nabokov). The most determined will arrange to disappear from the face of the earth, like Thomas Pynchon, a major force in modern fiction who is, to all biographical intents and purposes, a cipher. The morbid ...”

“... raped Clarissa has no business doing anything except dying. And Donaldson quotes Robert Bage and Thomas Holcroft, lesser novelists than Richardson, but also less extreme in their dreams of women, willing to resist the notion of the fate worse than death. Hardy too, in Tess, offers a girl who is ruined and survives to ...”

“... admiration for this as a dedication. There can be no intrinsic objection to such a dedication as Thomas Moore’s, of Lalla Rookh: – To Samuel Rogers, Esq., this Eastern Romance is inscribed by his very grateful and affectionate friend, Thomas Moore. But one may object that is not so interesting or original in its ...”

“... the doctrine of the Fall. In Daughters of Earth (1972) there is ‘The Faithful’, a rewriting of Hardy; ‘More Memories of Underdevelopment’, rewriting Hopkins; ‘How many devils can dance on the point...’ tracing the Calvinist logic of Cowper, whose ‘God moves in a mysterious way’ is to be just under the surface of other poems; and in particular ...”

“... would have preferred a different outcome. That they ended up with Bush is another example of a hardy perennial: the historical importance of unintended consequences. Historians encounter its workings whether they deal with political institutions, ideas or demography. But there is probably no other branch of the discipline in which unintended consequences ...”

“... is coaxingly familiar. It didn’t matter to Keats that Chatterton’s spurious versifying priest, Thomas Rowley, was a fiction. What he admired was the result, a revivifying of English style with plum Anglo-Saxonisms. Motion needs us to believe in Dr Tabor’s historicity for the sake of the literary debate that is the novella’s point. But to make the ...”

“... around electronic music and rave culture produced by journalists and academics) is clearly Thomas Bernhard, whose books also sometimes begin with an ellipsis. The prospect of Bernhard in Berghain doesn’t quite arrive, sadly: Goetz’s acoustic effects, such as filtering sentences to the ‘etc etc’ of a drum machine hi-hat or repeating ...”

“... and reprinted Victorian novelist. His new companions in the Abbey – Dickens, George Eliot and Hardy – may sell more copies of individual novels, but they cannot match the expansiveness of Trollope’s appeal. Forty or more of his works are currently in print – some in as many as five different editions. But for a century, Trollopians have complained ...”

“... the kind who were starting to take package trips to Benidorm instead – we, like the rest of the hardy self-improving lower middle classes, were bound for places where farmhouse bed and breakfasts cowered beneath looming ridges of wet, windswept heather, where there were ample supplies of fiddle music, and where every fishing village and handicrafts ...”

“... not blackshirts. But Karl Kraus and Joseph Roth had something to fear from their masses. When Thomas Mann condemns ‘the vulgarity of Hitler’ and laments, in his diaries, the ‘wretched, isolated, demented people, misled by a wild and stupid band of adventurers whom they take for mythical heroes’, is this an example of literary pride and prejudice ...”

“... villainy. 16 March. To St Etheldreda’s, Ely Place for the funeral of Anna Haycraft (aka Alice Thomas Ellis) who died a week or so ago in Wales and whose body had therefore to be brought down for the funeral and then presumably taken back to Wales to be buried beside Colin, her late husband, at their Welsh farmhouse. This, I gather, is pretty remote and ...”

“... the diverse poetries of Tennyson, Browning, Lewis Carroll, Christina Rossetti, Arnold, Hopkins, Hardy and Yeats. There are suggestive affiliations, as between Barnes and Hopkins, but no single narrative has explanatory power. A study of the emergence of modern poetry would need at least six lines of affiliation, by my count. More, if we included the ...”