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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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The Royal Beasts contains works of Empson’s previously unpublished or published long ago and very obscurely.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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”