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“... time. The rest is a tortured pastiche easily mocked; a strained symbolism whose Victorian diction, Swinburne with even more water, does not even let him succeed in sounding Frenchified. Any smart critic who wanted to make a popinjay out of Brennan would have plenty to go on. But those single lines and phrases live in the memory: ‘and sterile wisdom crowned ...”

“... any tinge of Gothic will have no time for the stories, those who find only windy rhetoric in Swinburne are likely to think ‘The Raven’ and ‘Ulalume’ merely ludicrous. But Auden’s remark about that verbose sentence is followed by his acknowledgment that it shows perfectly the narrator ‘in his real colours, as the fantastic self wno hates and ...”

“... with various Amor-related items kept in storage in the early lyrics, or on loan from Keats and Swinburne (vineyards, olive groves, emblematic minerals, pards, maelids, bassarids, the pad of furry feet in the undergrowth). This looks like dionysiac kitsch. But it was considered an improvement on the documentary rigours of Cantos LII-LXXI. Most reassuring of ...”

“... this immortal ‘me’. Discussing a study of 1883 entitled Walt Whitman and written by his friend Richard Bucke, he insists to Traubel that his endorsement of the book was never meant to extend to its interpretations: as to his explication – no, no, no – that I do not accept – for Leaves of Grass baffles me, its author, at all points of its meaning ...”

“... there are some vivid glimpses of the distant past. He recalls lunching at Bertolini’s ‘before Swinburne knew the place’, and (the unmistakable Hardy trademark) is back to the 17th century in two more hops: ‘In my time the floors were of stone, sanded, & the front of squared ashlar, just as in Dr Burney’s day, &, no doubt, Sir Isaac ...”

“... psychiatrist who is an expert on his own psychosis. This is not true of working on line-endings in Swinburne or desire in Deleuze; but in the long trek from Foucault to Family Guy, literary studies have moved closer to the everyday experience of their practitioners, even if so much of their talk is of otherness. This is also the reason so many students write ...”

“... of Catullus for years to come. As readers of The Victorians and Ancient Greece will know, Richard Jenkyns is an accomplished literary critic with the professional training of a Classicist. The preface to his new book is slightly misleading. One might infer from his attack on one-sidedness and reductivism that he intended to employ a variety of ...”

“... in the printing trade. The bulk of the forgeries were manufactured by the eminently respectable Richard Clay and Sons. The firm cannot, over a period of twenty years, have turned out a hundred or so piracies and ‘creative forgeries’ without someone noticing that their work was circulating in the second-hand market under false colours and at hugely ...”

“... fun’, and an essay by Carlyle of 1837: ‘There is nothing more Hogarthian comic.’ Next comes Swinburne, fifty years later, speaking of ‘an excellent Hogarthian comedy, full of rapid and vivid incident, of pleasant or indignant humour’. In 1978 Cecil Beaton attributes to the society philanthropist Lady Anne Tree ‘an oversize personality and ...”

“... sophisticated seekers after the purely indigenous origins of American fiction, as in the work of Richard Poirier (A World Elsewhere) or R.W.B. Lewis (The American Adam). One can see how smoothly Faulkner’s concentration on one obscure corner of Mississippi fits into this regionalist-patriotic pattern. His latest biographer says on his first page: ‘He is ...”

“... for himself under other names – whether as Flann O’Brien (‘As a lad I knew Ibsen … Swinburne and Joseph Conrad were also frequent visitors to my grandfather’s place … At dusk, Coleridge would sometimes look in on his way home for a final pipe, and more than once the burly shape of Lord Macaulay was known to grace the gathering’) or Myles ...”

“... of Vanity Fair. In ‘real life’, Meredith judiciously observes in his novel The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, ‘all hangs together,’ but that’s not obviously the way things work in the Meredithian world. What did his admirers see in him? A good place to start is G.M. Trevelyan’s The Poetry and Philosophy of George Meredith (1906), which helpfully ...”

“... comma counts, in that description); he, too, likes nothing better, while taking tea with Dr Richard Garnett, Principal Librarian at the British Museum, than brutally to crush the aspirations of any young person available for the purpose. Like Virginia Woolf, Ford asks where these abrupt and inexplicable furies came from. As Ford grew older, the beards ...”

“... as the baby’s middle name, and who gave the child the surname of her estranged husband, Richard Aldington, though he was not the father.But let’s back up: Hilda Doolittle was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in 1886, the only daughter and second child of the second marriage of Charles Doolittle, professor of astronomy and mathematics and Civil War ...”

“... to Scotland and was executed after being found under her bed) by William Henry Ireland and by Swinburne. Even so, there are some notable omissions. It is in vain, for example, that the breathless reader anticipates the fun and games Lewis might have with the sorrows Mary bequeaths to James and to us in the epistolary form of C.F. Barrett’s Mary Queen of ...”