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“... lines of ‘Pleased to meet you.’ ‘So I see.’ In essence, Chenoune’s book, like that of Hardy Amies, tells of the rise and near-eclipse of the suit, as evolved from the gentleman’s riding coat, and of the attempts by successive counter-cultures, delinquent and otherwise, to discredit it. In recent times ‘suit’ has been one of the dirtiest of ...”

“... Fred’s dazzling ‘Tilling’ comedies, and has, further, been said of the later writings of Henry James. But Benson couldn’t understand the latter, didn’t like them, and strongly disapproved of the treacherous cult of young acolytes like Hugh Walpole and Percy Lubbock who lit incense at the feet of the master. ‘Life’s nothing – unless heroic ...”

“... The imagination adores whatever can give the appearance of fact, as most good writers know. When Hardy tells us that the raindrops before a thunderstorm make spots on the road as large as nasturtium leaves, no reader is going to take him up on it. When Kipling tells us that a man’s blood on an Indian parade ground dries in the sun like ...”

“... sees in the press. The method, like Greene’s, is highly effective, but it can never produce what Henry James would have called ‘saturation’. Virginia Woolf remarked that A Handful of Dust was a brilliant novel but that she didn’t believe a word of it: a way of turning round the ordinary reader’s cliché to suggest that truth in fiction has a complex ...”

“... He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it’: T.S. Eliot writing of Henry James in the Little Review of August 1918. I want to take exception, not to the truth of Eliot’s pronouncement (he was right about James), but to the set of lofty assumptions calmly towering behind it. The young Eliot’s epigram summed up with cutting brevity a creed that for Modernists appeared beyond dispute ...”

“... This is the first full-length study of James Thomson’s life and work since Henry Salt’s in 1889. Thomson’s poem The City of Dreadful Night is known by name to many but has seldom been reprinted or discussed. Histories of literature say more about an earlier James Thomson (1700-48) who wrote The Seasons and ‘Rule Britannia’ and got into Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, though Johnson says his diction was ‘florid and luxuriant ...”

“... and hear 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 ...”

“... Henry Reed was a sad man but a funny man, and his poems are funny or sad – often, as in the celebrated ‘Lessons of the War’, both at once. I first met him in 1965, in the office of Robert Heilman, then the benevolent but firm head of the English Department at the University of Washington in Seattle. Calling to present my credentials, I walked into a row; Heilman benevolently firm, Reed furious, licensed to be furious ...”

“... Over the Thames, and over the Severn, The soul of white Tom   Shall float to Heaven – to Hardy’s ‘rather monotonously small follower Philip Larkin’, etc? If he despises William Carlos Williams, Dylan Thomas, Gertrude Stein, Robert Lowell, Charles Olson, Edith Sitwell, Augustus John and Ted Hughes, what’s the merit of vulgarity and ...”

“... method. Whereas Hamilton burned his fingers trying to steal Salinger’s flame, Millgate – Hardy’s biographer and the editor of his letters – was foiled by the impenetrability of the pyramid that the sage of Max Gate erected over his remains. By ghost-writing his own life through his secretary wife and burning all the revealingly private materials ...”

“... have ranged from Virginia Woolf to Derek Walcott, from Robert Frost to W.H. Auden, from Thomas Hardy to T.S. Eliot, not to speak of confrères such as Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke and Henry Newbolt. Ezra Pound, although savage in his denunciation of the use of idioms or phrases such as ‘dim lands of ...”

“... 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 forgotten. With ...”

“... was somewhat higher, and they might hobnob with the great in salons and house parties, where, as Henry James sometimes suggests, they were cultivated for their celebrity or their charm rather than for their books – see, for example, ‘The Death of the Lion’. Society was open to the talents, but to have the right background could only help, and ...”

“... mort, though ‘the magical variety of mushroom could go in here too for the more experienced and hardy psychonaut.’ Delia would be proud of her new friends’ simplicity and economy. ‘In a dry frying-pan,’ we are advised for the preparation of the majoun, ‘the cannabis is toasted over a very low heat until it begins to release an ...”

“... that sex was the real problem, the others being mere sequelae. The resemblance between Gissing and Hardy, whom he much admired, is only superficial. Hardy also thought marriage hopeless: ‘there is no satisfactory scheme for the conjunction of the sexes.’ But Hardy felt this thought as ...”