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“... gardening, and established a fashionable gathering-place for such promising young intellectuals as Southey, Coleridge, Beddoes and Mackintosh. The young Josiah was even more aware of the distinction between ‘gentlemen’ and ‘men engaged in business’ and had the insensitivity to lecture his father on the subject. ‘I have been for too long in the habit ...”

“... for Europe. For a while they lived in Deyá, Mallorca, where Mathews came under the influence of Robert Graves, whose The White Goddess lurks behind some of the arcane mystic lore that turns up in the plot of his first novel, The Conversions (1962). A much greater influence on his early fiction, however, was Raymond Roussel, to whose work he was introduced ...”

“... through the same telescope which he applies to the moon and stars’, as his friend Southey complained – as though he were inadvertently producing a kind of mock-heroic by deploying the resources of verse on all the wrong things. In a way, although obviously unsympathetic, the critics were not being obtuse; but where they detected a perverse ...”