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“... What is lacking is the note of intimacy, the tone so natural to Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Barbara Pym or Elizabeth Bowen that their readers (perhaps particularly the male ones) only notice it in terms of their own feeling of gratified response to what seems a subtlety of fellow-feeling, a gratifyingly tacit appeal to their own insight and ...”

“... put into my head by Anthony Thwaite’s selection of the poet’s letters. Booth, together with Barbara Everett, is among the few critics who have produced real illumination about the way the poems work: ways of working which notoriously have become more and more indefinable the more public and popular a figure the poet has become – and indeed the more he ...”

“... ignoring likewise the claims of later secretaries such as Peter Quennell and Robert Gathorne-Hardy, he bestowed the prize on the latest incumbent, the young John Russell. It was a bitter blow at the time to Connolly, who never found it easy to remain solvent, and who tended with an insouciance which has something rather admirable about it to have little ...”

“... Thomas and other romantics, Yeats becoming prime among them; and Yeats was finally driven out by Hardy. Yet even after the poet had found his style, he continued to write sometimes highly competent verses that didn’t, however, qualify to go into the three volumes of poems he wished to preserve: The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings, High Windows. These ...”

“... beyond romantic stereotype. McAleer contrasts the Mills & Boon product with the iron-knickered Barbara Cartland and her crusade – extended over five hundred novels – against the horrific consequences of pre-marital sex. Cartland is deficient in what McAleer discerns as the ‘light, even witty, touch’ of the best Mills & Boon authors when it comes to ...”

“... together in paragraphs that go on for pages. Here is the end of a section called ‘Clement loves Barbara Keenan’, in which Clement’s gazing at a classmate during Mass yields to a vision of an idealised American landscape he knows only from National Geographic and songs on the radio:Clement sees, a few seats ahead of him, ...”

“... from Thwaite himself, the few who are spared include figures like Vernon Watkins, Gavin Ewart, Barbara Pym: allies who are genuinely liked and admired but who are nonetheless junior to Larkin in talent and repute. The really big hates tend to be reserved for sizable poetic rivals. Ted Hughes is a recurrent, near-obsessive target, with S. Heaney advancing ...”

“... Rousseau, and Chateaubriand, and Stendhal in La Vie de Henri Brulard, and Newman and Ruskin and Hardy – all the way down to Anthony Powell in his Memoirs and the just published diaries of Barbara Pym. Indeed this contribution to the state of the art by a humbler sister in the fiction business – and appearing ...”

“... the poet to ‘go and do unlikewise’, an exercise certainly made fruitful by the succession of Hardy to Yeats as the poet for whom Larkin has a special feeling. Similarly, much that is colloquial and downright in Larkin’s diction seems half to depend on a conscious and remedial turning-away from Modernist abstraction that could hardly have proceeded ...”

“... who observed, not without point, that our period has produced little at the level of Eliot, Yeats, Hardy: it is probably as good as any single short poem written by any of them. The ‘philistinism’ of ‘Livings 1’ is central to the poem, not incidental; it is ‘principled’ in a full sense. The lines, spoken in the first person, define the life of a ...”

“... translating Queneau’s books is a beastly task. Nevertheless, thanks in large part to the great Barbara Wright, he has been fairly well served in this respect. (Wright’s wry, no-nonsense prefaces to her translations are little masterpieces in themselves, full of brisk practicality: ‘All translation, without exception, is difficult, and I am never quite ...”

“... his great contemporary rival Tennyson, and the principal 20th-century poets, including even Yeats, Hardy and Wallace Stevens, let alone the various fashionable Modernists whose reputations are now rightly in rapid decline.’Such an estimate may do justice to the scale of Browning’s work. Whether it comes to terms with Browning’s actual identity as a poet ...”

“... she had starred in a film, all of them famous. First was Mickey Rooney, the star of the Andy Hardy pictures. Rooney was effervescently manic, the kind of man who would attempt to bring the house down during a quiet lunch. As the marriage disintegrated, Howard Hughes appeared on the scene. Hughes saw her for what she was about to become: the commodifiable ...”

“... to reach a wide readership. ‘A phenomenon of such extended malignance as the Great War,’ Barbara Tuchman wrote in The Proud Tower (1966), ‘does not come out of a golden age.’ Two recent studies of the prewar world, Florian Illies’s whimsical kaleidoscopic bestseller, 1913, and Charles Emmerson’s magnificent global study, 1913: The World ...”

“... or Irish scholar who’d spent years carefully tracking and tracing the continuities between Hardy and Larkin and Geoffrey Hill, say, and producing learned monographs on the Movement or on Ted Hughes suddenly took the notion to write a book about Frederic Prokosch (a poet, like Day Lewis, who made most of his money from novels), or Archibald MacLeish ...”