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“... they fit with the image of the eternal Englishman which the Memoirs promote. Some years ago D.J. Enright remarked that although most of Sassoon’s satires hit the mark, the target he aimed at was usually a sitting duck. It is true. The poems operate from a standpoint of decency, and that is both their strength and their weakness. Sassoon attacked ...”

“... or a useful edition; Emrys Jones is praised for a model political reading of Cymbeline, as is D.J. Enright for a poem that is also an act of criticism. But the level of citation of others’ work is low, especially by American standards, and with the single exception of Hugh Kenner no practising fellow academic earns the accolade of even approaching classic ...”

“... rather than the scattered single volumes of the first publication. In 1992 Kilmartin and D.J. Enright offered a new version corresponding to a later and different Pléiade text of 1987-89. At this point the old title, Remembrance of Things Past, was dropped, and the plainer In Search of Lost Time taken on.There is more. In 2013, the first volume of ...”

“... Both of them, however, say a good deal about these wrangles. For Walter Redfern’s Puns and D.J. Enright’s collection on euphemisms, Fair of Speech, are more diverting and diverse than this notice of them can bring home. Redfern’s book teems with instances, with brilliant French/English translations, with diatribes against the pun down the ages, and with ...”

“... own kind of breakthrough. If poetry is what is lost in translation, we lose still more, as D.J. Enright pointed out, if it is not translated. But Raine is right that Pasternak’s ‘brief lists’ in sound and association have no way of surviving in English. In the marvellous poem ‘In Hospital’, which describes one of his and Zhivago’s heart ...”

“... who is ‘rich in what is given to few writers and poor in what is given to most men’ (D.J. Enright). We may sneakily feel it appropriate that Nabokov the mandarin spent the last two decades of his life in a hotel suite in Montreux – after all, this lofty, cold, smug, politically neutral figure is himself a kind of one-man Switzerland. The trouble ...”

“... how that could be so.) Incidentally, the book was turned down by another Leavis pupil, D.J. Enright, at Chatto; perhaps I should add that he had no occasion to consult my feelings. MacKillop describes in his usual detail the extraordinary series of events which followed Brian Vickers’s acceptance of a fellowship (to teach English) at Downing. Leavis ...”

“... experience strengthened and independent – such as L.C. Knights, James Smith, D.W. Harding, D.J. Enright and Marius Bewley. If the Establishment had really been as clever and conspiratorial as Leavis always thought, it would have disabled him by making him a Reader at Cambridge or perhaps Professor of Poetry at Oxford. In fact, being amorphous, the ...”

“... his Celtic romanticism’. He was part of a left-wing circle that included Raymond Williams, D.J. Enright and Maurice Craig, a Northern Irishman who remembered Henderson as ‘very loud-voiced, very insistently Scottish, and constantly singing’. During the two years he spent in Cambridge before the Second World War bore him off to North Africa, Henderson ...”

“... a clever swine But they were the only ones Who ever stood by you. ‘Rubber Ring’ D.J. Enright offered a nicely disgruntled definition of postmodernism in Injury Time, his posthumously published memoir: ‘All it suggests,’ he writes, ‘if that isn’t putting it too strongly, is that something comes after something else – as indeed most ...”

“... can easily become the condescending heartlessness which so attenuates Nabokov’s fiction’. D.J. Enright found Nabokov ‘rich in what is given to few writers and poor in what is given to most men’. Martin Seymour-Smith, reviewing Laughter in the Dark, described Nabokov as ‘a kind of Satanic Mantovani, coming into cruel close-up on your screens at the ...”

“... that extraordinary one about a murdered child.’ Otherwise? John Betjeman in subject matter, D.J. Enright in style. Meditations in strict metre – rather like pared-down paras by P.D. James. A wide expanse of heavy sun-speckled water which, as she watched, was flicked by the strengthening breeze into a million small waves like a restless inland sea. Anorexic ...”

“... topic is anti-intellectualism: Carey has always celebrated writers who, as he once said of D.J. Enright, ‘champion … ordinary existence over the whimsies of the overeducated’, and this new book ends with a celebration of Les Murray, a poet of the non-whimsical and ordinary whose blokeish credentials seem cast iron. ‘His values were down-to-earth and ...”

“... chill grasp of rationalism. Their response was unexpected but not at all inexplicable: what D.J. Enright once called Crow’s ‘disastrous vim’ expresses itself in things that feel a bit like the liberated violence you get in jokes or in Tom and Jerry, and often end, as that example does, with something very like a punchline. Hughes understood all ...”

“... this is decidedly back-handed – and I should like to remove the curse by quoting the end of D.J. Enright’s British Council leaflet on Eliot at the time of his centenary in 1988. ‘Many of his lines, felt “as immediately as the odour of a rose”, have entered the language in the form of catch-phrases or adages.’ ...”