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Going on the air

Philip French, 2 May 1985

Orwell: The War Broadcasts 
edited by W.J. West.
Duckworth/BBC, 304 pp., £12.95, March 1985, 0 7156 1916 0
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... and BBC contemporaries included Alan Bullock (recipient of a self-righteous Orwell memo), William Empson and John Morris (both of whom wrote elegant memoirs of Orwell at the BBC); he employed Nye Bevan, Richard Acland, J.B.S. Haldane, T.S. Eliot, Quintin Hogg, Bernard Shaw; he led a BBC party, that included Guy Burgess, to a special de-briefing ...

The Real Life of Melodrama

Philip Horne, 16 June 1983

Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter 
by Mario Vargas Llosa, translated by Helen Lane.
Faber, 374 pp., £7.95, May 1983, 0 571 13021 6
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... power it can exercise in its apparently casual juxtapositions and fateful convergences. William Empson has noted how ‘much can be put into it; to those who miss the connections the thing still seems sensible, and queer connections can be insinuated powerfully and unobtrusively.’ In the novel before Aunt Julia, Captain Pantoja and the ...

Lyrics and Ironies

Christopher Ricks, 4 December 1986

The Alluring Problem: An Essay on Irony 
by D.J. Enright.
Oxford, 178 pp., £12.95, October 1986, 0 19 212253 3
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Czeslaw Milosz and the Insufficiency of Lyric 
by Donald Davie.
Cambridge, 76 pp., £15, September 1986, 0 521 32264 2
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... Freud must be very unsettling to necessitate such cushions. Enright’s poem ‘Anecdote from William IV Street’ – about a request for the works of Freud and for an artwork of Jesus Christ – succeeds in its succinct ruefulness, the melting sentiment (as Eliot said of Goldsmith) just held in check by the precision of the language. But when telling us ...

On a Chinese Mountain

Frank Kermode, 20 November 1986

The Royal Beasts 
by William Empson.
Chatto, 201 pp., £12.95, November 1986, 0 7011 3084 9
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Essays on Shakespeare 
by William Empson.
Cambridge, 246 pp., £25, May 1986, 0 521 25577 5
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... The Royal Beasts contains works of Empson’s previously unpublished or published long ago and very obscurely. There is a short play, an unfinished novel, a ballet scenario and a batch of poems, all early. It is the third posthumous volume and much the most important, though a fourth – a collection of essays on 17th-century poetry and drama – is promised for 1987 ...

Wild Bill

Stephen Greenblatt, 20 October 1994

Essays on Renaissance Literature. Vol. II 
by William Empson, edited by John Haffenden.
Cambridge, 292 pp., £35, May 1994, 0 521 44044 0
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... It would be easy for a reader who was encountering Empson for the first time to wonder what on earth this critical performance was about and why these ragged relics – the second part of a two-volume edition of his miscellaneous writings on Renaissance literature – were being presented with such thoughtfulness and scrupulous care ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Alice in Wonderland’, 25 March 2010

Alice in Wonderland 
directed by Tim Burton.
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... here – bedtime, death and marriage – is very impressive, however awful the verse is, and William Empson has a wonderful aside on this subject: ‘I remember believing I should have to die in order to grow up, and thinking the prospect very disagreeable.’ In Burton’s movie the blue hookah-smoking caterpillar grows up in this sense, and ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘True Grit’, 3 February 2011

True Grit 
directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen.
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... the simple life, it never quite chases the shadows of cruelty and corruption away, and what William Empson called the trick of simplification was always the thing. The mode kept remembering what it was ostensibly getting rid of. Charles Portis’s funny and violent novel True Grit (1968) is the perfect pastoral of the ungallant west. It presents a ...

Even paranoids have enemies

Frank Kermode, 24 August 1995

F.R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism 
by Ian MacKillop.
Allen Lane, 476 pp., £25, July 1995, 0 7139 9062 7
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... intimately, more agonistically engaged with poetry than anybody else except possibly the youthful William Empson, whom at this time he greatly admired. And the whole business of criticism acquired a new and exhilarating quality. That gnarled manner of speaking or writing sounded serious, deliberate and urgent, a new way of stressing the high importance ...

Diary

Patrick Parrinder: On Raymond Williams, 18 February 1988

... of brawls and a series of obituary notices. One by one the giants have departed: Leavis, Richards, Empson, and now Raymond Williams. The first three had come through to ripe and embattled old age, but Williams was still in his prime as a writer and critic. When I visited him in Saffron Walden in late December, he had been laid up for several months with a ...

Diary

Robert Fothergill: Among the Leavisites, 12 September 2019

... of Jesus. He goes in for Morris dancing, you know. I’ve seen him with bells on his legs.’ ‘William Empson, gentlemen. Seldom seen out of pubs.’ ‘There is not a single living man of letters with less moral courage than Thomas Stearns Eliot.’ He was theatrical, with bushy raised eyebrows, a fondness for dramatic pauses and a way of literally ...

The Subtleties of Frank Kermode

Michael Wood, 17 December 2009

... kept it there. A slightly unlikely but highly qualified member of Our (or Their) Age was William Empson, who went up to Cambridge in 1925 and down again in disgrace in 1929. There are three essays on Empson in this book, and he and his teacher I.A. Richards are in one sense its heroes, variable and (in ...

Untouched by Eliot

Denis Donoghue: Jon Stallworthy, 4 March 1999

Rounding the Horn: Collected Poems 
by Jon Stallworthy.
Carcanet, 247 pp., £14.95, September 1998, 1 85754 163 4
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... on his own work or even to lead his readers through a particular poem. Valéry, Allen Tate, William Empson, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren and Robert Lowell were instructive in that way. But it is rare for a poet to lead readers through a poem, draft by draft, or explain how he settled for one word rather than another. Yeats did not offer to ...

The Devilish God

David Wheatley: T.S. Eliot, 1 November 2001

Words Alone: The Poet T.S. Eliot 
by Denis Donoghue.
Yale, 326 pp., £17.95, January 2001, 0 300 08329 7
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Adam’s Curse: Reflections on Religion and Literature 
by Denis Donoghue.
Notre Dame, 178 pp., £21.50, May 2001, 0 268 02009 4
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... his reception into the Church of England in 1927. The key to this side of his personality, as William Empson was surely right to suggest, was the sloughing off of his boyhood Unitarianism, which he seems to have associated ever afterwards with his less than properly assertive father (though on the Christian-baiting ...

On Ange Mlinko

Paul Franz, 5 July 2018

... love’; ‘And love as-is absorbed a gone oasis’), lines whose springy compactness might recall William Empson but also, more immediately, Lynette Roberts, the Argentinian Anglo-Welsh modernist with whom Mlinko identifies as a fellow quasi-exile, and to whom she devoted a lengthy poetic tribute in her last collection. Such lines respond to high ...

From a Summer to an Autumn

Michael Wood: Julian Barnes, 9 May 2013

Levels of Life 
by Julian Barnes.
Cape, 118 pp., £10.99, April 2013, 978 0 224 09815 1
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... to truths. This is always their salvation, whether griefless or griefstruck. This is what William Empson called learning a style from a despair, and what is moving here is not the argument or even the insistence on survival and salvation, but the intricate fallacy at work in the sequence of thought. Grief destroys belief; we accept this ...

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