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“... imagination, and went so far as to doubt whether his works should be called poetry. Matthew Arnold took this line further, dismissing Pope and Dryden as ‘classics of our prose’. Attacks on Pope’s morals also continued in the 19th century: C.W. Dilke was shocked to discover that Pope had ‘cooked’ a few letters in his published correspondence by ...”

“... escaped from a prison camp and joined a band of Italian partisans during the Second World War. David Storm Rice, an expert on Islamic metalwork, had an affair with Clara Malraux, fought as a commando in Ethiopia and, after a distinguished career as an art historian, suffered a nervous breakdown and committed suicide. Robin Zaehner carried out dangerous ...”

“... as laziness or perfidy, but merely as the constraints of genre. ‘Plenty of people,’ as Matthew Arnold remarked, ‘will try to give the masses, as they call them, an intellectual food prepared and adapted in the way they think proper for the actual conditions of the masses.’ Fair enough: Parsons is dishing up traditional plain fare and one would seek in ...”

“... A timid Tamil schoolmaster makes an unlikely adventurer in ‘Buried Lives’. Taking Matthew Arnold to heart (‘But there’s a something in this breast’), he breaks out of his stale existence and makes for the unknown satisfactions of the West. Against all expectations, including his own, it looks as though he might succeed. The last story, ‘The ...”

“... unless you accept that there is no substitute for, no viable alternative to, clarity. According to David Matthews, Tippett himself has come close to this view – ever since the early Sixties, when he ‘joined Britten in a liking for clear, uncluttered textures’. Did he? And has he thus continued? On and off. His most recent, Fourth Quartet (1977-8) is a ...”

“... looks at present-day English suburbs in photographs by Martin Parr and a painting of a patio by David Rayson are also urban landscapes rather than garden pictures. In Rayson’s picture white plastic chairs on a neatly mown lawn lean around a table as if avoiding the gaze of the identical new brick houses which surround them.There are pieces in the sections ...”

“... how carefully Lawrence refuses to recognise virtue in anyone but himself’), and his sponsor David Pryce-Jones now finds F.R. Leavis much the same, so it may be legitimate to cite the famous excoriation of Bloomsbury that was voiced by Lawrence and amplified by Leavis: ‘they talked endlessly, but endlessly – and never, never a good thing said. They ...”

“... This, more or less, is how Present Times begins, and one thing very quickly becomes clear: David Storey likes compound ...”

“... had enough younger people whom I admired, and still had my old chums from the Review, Colin, Hugo, David Harsent; they just carried over and became part of this larger thing.Did you get any help from the eminenti who’d tried to float a magazine?None at all. I didn’t really know them. And didn’t admire them, particularly. There was a whole social aspect ...”

“... Bennett and Mrs Brown’, which urges the development of new narrative techniques and criticises Arnold Bennett and other Edwardian novelists for doing exactly what Hall does throughout The Unlit Lamp: deduce identity from a description of environment and appearance. Literary scholars have tended to take Woolf’s word for it. They have on the whole been as ...”

“... his usual criteria for making judgments and urges us to do the same. ‘Right and wrong,’ Arnold Toynbee wrote, ‘are the same in Palestine as anywhere else. What is peculiar about the Palestine conflict is that the world has listened to the party that has committed the offence and has turned a deaf ear to the victims.’ For Dr O’Brien, right and ...”

“... transition from doctrinaire communism to doctrinaire snobbery. Trevelyan had possibly been reading Arnold Bennett, the prolific Edwardian chronicler of lives in gradual but by no means uneventful decline: ‘declension’, Bennett called it, with a nod to the term’s grammatical sense, as though to indicate that steady failure can serve as well as spectacular ...”

“... a pot-boy (Bob Gliddery in Our Mutual Friend), seven surgeons, three dance-masters, a reporter (David Copperfield), a tobacconist (Mrs Chivery in Little Dorrit), two fishermen, 32 teachers, four blacksmiths, six undertakers, 45 lawyers and sixteen landladies, several magistrates, a weaver (Stephen Blackpool in Hard Times), an umbrella-maker (Alexander Trott ...”

“... the claws were bared less often. These extracts, chosen by Benson’s splendid biographer, David Newsome, from among the four million words of the diaries Benson left as his memorial, are taken from a period in Benson’s life when he was uncertain and hypersensitive, so the claws are out. It was at the turn of the century, and Benson, having been ...”

“... or ‘The New Prospectus’, and the essays were later published as Anticipations. His friend Arnold Bennett referred to them mockingly as ‘Uncle’s-dissipations’, but for Wells futurology was anything but a sideline. In fact he was tempted to regard the scientific romances and humorous journalism with which he had made his mark in the Nineties as ...”