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“... head’, though the mother, choosing not to see, has ‘turned her good eyes blind’. The word Hugh Kenner chose in The Stoic Comedians to describe the style of phrasemaking in Ulysses was ‘unmortared’. Joyce brought together words that seemed to have no affinity and made them fit flush against each other, leaving no gap. He built dry-stone walls ...”

“... if not Forrest Gump. But then again the modernists had no aversion to pop culture ephemera. As Hugh Kenner showed in A Sinking Island, we might not have had Ulysses without Tit-Bits. The internet turns out to be Natalie’s undoing. She takes to visiting a website (it might be the one Leah tells her about during an instant-message ...”

“... were praised as skilful, though Kenneth Tynan ventured to call the latter play ‘banal’. Hugh Kenner complained that the characters in them speak English English, rather than American English, though why he expected otherwise of a writer who had been listening to English talk for half a century is a question. So the story ends on the familiar ...”

“... of admiring scholars, and a certain amount of courage for the critic to resist the urge to please. Hugh Kenner, an adept in the art of winning friends and influencing people, recalls in his preface to The Invisible Poet: T.S. Eliot (1960) that ‘at my one meeting with Mr Eliot, I offered to complete a book on his literary career without pestering ...”

“... talk in the Library, at about 3.30, and he is with the party of medical students by about 10.00. Kenner thinks he has been boozing and standing drinks all the time, which proves he has gone rotten, and he does seem to have lost 13 shillings – but surely this includes the outlay for the student party itself. He notices, earlier in the day, that he needs to ...”

“... that way, by the stimulation and vigorous reactivation of its own internal relations and circuits. Hugh Kenner once observed the not-so-subterranean formal influence on books like Ulysses of the existence of dictionaries and encyclopedias as proudly linear modes of organisation. Mallarmé imagined in vain a book that would remodel itself perpetually, like ...”

“... and deep deconstruction would win tenure for making serious. In his book A Colder Eye, Hugh Kenner asked how O’Brien dared to try ‘to suppress his own great book’, The Third Policeman, which Kenner thought ‘a unique mature minor novel’ (whatever that is) compared to At Swim-Two-Birds, which he ...”

“... years since Yeats’s Introduction to The Words upon the Window-Pane, come up with the names of Hugh Kenner, Denis Donoghue, Geoffrey Hill, Robert M. Adams, Michael Foot, Norman Brown, J. Middleton Murry, George Orwell, André Breton, F.R. Leavis. Said’s overlooking of most (not all) of these might strike you as a shade provincial, but they aren’t ...”

“... as Carey reminds us it was in A Little History, as ‘a “triumph of philistinism”’.Hugh Kenner, who devotedly attended the monuments of high modernism from the other side of the Atlantic, once wrote a spirited book called A Sinking Island, all about the dismal effects that an endemic philistinism had wrought in England, encompassing ...”

“... keep fizzing even as Epictetus sedates. Above all, there is the sympathetic identification, what Hugh Kenner, speaking of Joyce, calls the Uncle Charles Principle: Naipaul’s description so assumes Biswas’s way of thinking that it comically, pedantically offers the precise brand-name of the stomach powder, just as Biswas would if he were narrating ...”

“... obligations of citizenship. Normally invisible, traces of it surface in the work of a critic like Hugh Kenner, pillar of the reactionary National Review, who gives equal praise to the joking despair of Beckett and the regimented utopianism of Buckminster Fuller. The alliance, in one form or another, is of long standing. Baudelaire understood its nature ...”

“... is a brazenness about the manoeuvre which in an odd way I find engaging, as it is in the young Hugh Kenner from whom I would guess Makin learned it. But someone who so dashingly cuts his corners – he does so at one point about the iambic pentameter, and elsewhere (really rather deplorably) about the British Great War poets – has to be watched, all ...”

“... about Everyman’). The conscious disintegration of technique can be a productive process, as Hugh Kenner argues apropos of Beckett, whom he sees as having made a long journey towards an ideal incapacity: The early Murphy is at least something like a novel. It has even a timetable, and one would have expected practice to increase its author’s ...”

“... critical acknowledgment in the period between Richard Ellmann’s 1959 biography of Joyce and Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era (1971). Kenner’s book, based in part on interviews with Pound, presents itself as a parting glimpse of an age of demi-gods. It marvellously exhibits, by a vivid survey of ...”

“... it all in train, like the butterfly whose wings started the storm. In his 1980 book on Ulysses, Hugh Kenner wrote that there was a rumour that Griffith had a ‘Jewish adviser-ghostwriter’, but the annotators here state that they ‘have been unable to substantiate the existence of such a rumour’. Unless, of course, the rumour is in Ulysses ...”