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“... man about town. He gained a first-class degree at Birmingham in 1934 and wrote a notable thesis on Thomas Hardy, leaving the University two years later as its youngest MA. Like most of his Birmingham contemporaries, he had so far lived at home, but was not a happy member of the household. Hal was ashamed of his parents, or so they felt, and only his ...”

“... in houses grand or primitive. Surrounding them are figures more tenuously linked to Purbeck: Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, James Meade Falkner (who wrote Moonfleet), Gerald Brenan, John Stewart Collis, Fritz Schumacher, John Eliot Gardiner (son of Rolf) and via him Roger Norrington, Lord Hinchinbrooke, Jimmy Edwards, Kenneth Allsop, Tariq Ali, Fenner ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... which seems for her the open-ended predication of a new “life story”.’ (If what?) Barbara Hardy shares with Stewart a sense of the Victorian novel’s maturity, a maturity which exacts the full range of 20th-century exegetic skill. But in other respects the two critics are traditions apart. The gulf separating them in starkly evident in a long ...”

“... Thomas Hardy, it is said, believed the history of humanity could be written in six words: ‘They lived, they suffered, they died.’ As a historical account this was more than adequate. It depicted change over time, contained a point of view, and encapsulated a universally applicable lesson. What detail the story lacked could be supplied by readers, each in their own way ...”

“... or Chatterton or Baudelaire or D.H. Lawrence or Ernest Hemingway as conventional, but what about Thomas Hardy or Anthony Trollope or Jane Austen or Charles Dickens or John Galsworthy? And, in particular, what about John Mortimer? He would, I think, indignantly deny the suggestion, but although he espouses unconventional causes he represents the ...”

“... resourced language would necessarily distort the subject. Writing about the work of Roy Fisher in Thomas Hardy and British Poetry, Donald Davie takes Fisher to be ‘restricting himself as self-denyingly as Larkin to the urbanised and industrialised landscapes of modern England’ and identifies a trade-off: ‘the poem is concerned with a social ...”

“... living thing, creature, or being is the full achievement of itself,’ he says in his Study of Thomas Hardy, a sentiment which might have been uttered by John Stuart Mill himself. But what Lawrence meant by ‘self’ was not to be confused with the ‘cheap egotism’ of the ‘self-conscious little ego’ described by modern individualism. ‘I know ...”

“... Auden’ in his early work, but it became clearer in the 1940s that his real poetic masters were Hardy and, more indirectly, Wordsworth. By the 1950s this could have made for recognition of unobvious continuities with the disciplined mundanity of a younger poet such as Larkin rather than with either the metaphysical disjunctions of post-Eliot Modernists or ...”

“... through. He also takes time to revisit earlier books. Boss Cupid’s epigraph, a quotation from Thomas Hardy – ‘Well, it’s a cool queer tale!’ – first caught Gunn’s eye in an essay written in 1972, where he cited it straight-faced; now it is reused to point up the modern connotations of ‘cool’ and ‘queer’. The second poem of the ...”

“... Charles 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 ...”

“... The absurdity of the Gothick was captured and its pretensions crisply punctured by Jane Austen and Thomas Love Peacock, but reality was often stranger than anything that even the most fetid literary imagination could come up with. Nothing could have been odder, more menacing or even more prophetic – when viewed with hindsight – than the Broken Column built ...”

“... so golden for them over the years. The same inertia is evident with the works of Woolf, Joyce, Hardy and Yeats. With much hoo-hah the world was informed in the late Eighties that the text of Ulysses was a disgrace, and a new perfected text would be introduced to coincide with the termination of copyright (this was the ill-fated Gabler edition). Macmillan ...”

“... of Beauties of Sterne, the Wit and Wisdom of Sir Walter Scott, George Eliot’s Sayings, or the Thomas Hardy Calendar, and the few who have actually looked inside such volumes will have done so only because the ‘real’ copy of the novel they were seeking had already been taken out of the library. Trained in a system which encourages the dutiful ...”

“... a most beautiful place, and it has been open to the public before. When George III first visited Thomas Weld here in 1789, he came to a house which was already receiving visitors between ten o’clock and two every Wednesday. The Weymouth guidebook described Lulworth Castle as ‘one of the finest scats in the county’, detailing many of the paintings and ...”