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“... had taken to be just such an immersing in the deconstructive element: Sylvia Plath ‘was, to use Henry James’s well-worn phrase, immersing herself in the destructive element’. I’m afraid this now reads banally ‘Joseph Conrad’s’.) The Oxford memory is this: ‘The highest academic compliment I received as an undergraduate was “Mr Larkin can see ...”

“... of ideological complacence. On the contrary: her prose is always in too much of a rush (her cousin Henry Holland called her charming letters ‘a heterogeneous mass of nonsense’) ever to calm down and show itself pleased with itself. What is lacking is the note of intimacy, the tone so natural to Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Barbara Pym or Elizabeth Bowen ...”

“... Henry James was a great haunter of drawing-rooms and dining-rooms, but it is not easy to picture him in a place called the Library of America, which is the name of the edition of which these volumes form a part. How does he look, posing for posterity alongside Poe, Jefferson, Melville, Mark Twain, Jack London, Harriet Beecher Stowe and others? Is he smiling at some of the company he is keeping; frowning momentarily at the presence of Whitman, who at first he thought was not a poet but a man merely ‘bullied by the accidents’ of experience? Does he make one of his oblique and courteous jokes, expressing surprise that America, in view of everything he thought it lacked, should have a library? ‘No sovereign,’ he said, wryly itemising his country’s social and cultural austerity, ‘no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools – no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class – no Epsom nor Ascot!’ Of course James was speaking of America in the 1830s, the world the young Hawthorne looked out on, and he was exaggerating anyway ...”

“... When Margaret Drabble says that, like Trollope, ‘Henry James admires the inimitable, unpurchasable gleam of time’, and describes his Poynton as ‘a Mentmore in miniature’, or when she writes of ‘the allegorical significance and sexual innuendo of the medieval garden’, or remarks that architectural irregularity, to English eyes, ‘seems to be a key, a touchstone, a mystic pledge of some indefinable authenticity’, or calls Dickens ‘the great poet of pollution’, or reminds us that, in Wordsworth’s time, ‘the love of nature seemed almost to replace the love of mankind,’ or says a thousand other such things as she wanders through the settings of our stories and poetry, it becomes obvious that we are in for a new look at this celebrated scenery ...”

“... Henry James was foul about Far from the Madding Crowd when it appeared in 1874. He was a young writer, ambitious, seething, silkily aggressive. There was ground to be cleared, and residents had to be deported. Thomas Hardy, with his knobbly rusticities and merry peasants, would not do ...”

“... he once informed an inquirer. It’s no surprise he professed himself ‘grieved’ by his friend Hardy’s pessimism, as he told Edmund Gosse, a judgment that Gosse did not hesitate to pass on to Hardy, adding spryly: ‘I wonder whether you were not saddened by his optimism? There is something to me almost flighty in his ...”

“... Bruce Bennett, to publish details of the events behind it in Spirit in Exile. In the 1950s Jannice Henry, an 18-year-old doctor’s daughter from Surrey, fell in love with her father’s locum, Neil Micklem. Their affair lasted for years; Jannice hoped it would end in marriage. It did not. She married instead a 30-year-old advertising copywriter called Peter ...”

“... listen out for, and having heard it, to identify and characterise it. ‘I suppose the thing about Hardy is,’ Bayley would typically begin, as though together we were to try and get to the bottom of a fascinating, but contradictory, mutual acquaintance. The presiding genius of these discussions was humour. The contingencies and incongruities of life, the ...”

“... Eliot Norton lectures she declares, with no shadow of demonstration or argument, that Thomas Hardy the poet ‘cannot by any standard of evaluation be called great’. Though an Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Oxford obviously speaks on such matters with authority, for Dame Helen to deliver herself of this ex cathedra judgment solely on her ...”

“... called ‘semantic succour’; it is as likely to draw us back to the Metaphysical poets, to Hardy or to Herrick as it is to refer us to Heidegger, Bakhtin or Adorno. It was in order to extend a tradition – rather than to domesticate Prynne – that Donald Davie devoted a section of his 1972 Thomas Hardy and British ...”

“... Master George’s ‘progress in learning I can scarcely say too little’. His father, George Henry Moore, a successful racehorse owner and politician, was convinced his eldest son was a dunce and took the time-honoured step of attempting to browbeat him into an Army career. Moore junior balked at the discipline of military training college and was ...”

“... been sons to raise and the house to pay for. The tenants were carefully chosen; they needed to be hardy, resourceful, likeable and interesting, as indeed they mostly were. At the top, virtually in the roof, there was Peter Cadogan, left-wing humanist and champion of lost causes; a typographer, a batique artist and a dress designer, inter alia, occupied the ...”

“... Intellectual hero to Noel Annan, whose political heroine is Margaret Thatcher, should Isaiah Berlin be left to the – ‘unfashionable’ – enthusiasms of Our Age? Or consigned to the plaudits that have broken out for his latest volume from the Spectator to the New Statesman? He himself strikes a more modest note. ‘I talk about other people. I examine their views ...”

“... their printed works, on occasion, for various reasons. No novelist has made such a job of it as Henry James. In July 1905 he began the task of revising his life’s work, in order to create a final statement, a complete collection of his works, called from its inception the New York Edition. James actually believed that this gigantic labour would be ...”

“... who tried to kill the goose that was laying golden eggs. The many authors, for example, even Hardy himself, who increasingly denounced the paralysing effect upon literature and society of Mrs Grundyism – were they themselves being hypocritical, or just blind to their own best interests? Could they not see that the whole depth and suggestion of their ...”