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“... hermeneutics’ into ‘ordinary speech’ they let too much of the substance leak away. And Christopher Ricks has his own especially irritating way of using ‘ordinary-language type of analysis against all who attempt theory’. We have here a mixture of disapproval and envy. Disapproval of English critical ‘conversation’ spills over into a ...”

“... a book we can’t lay hands on even in the Bodleian – but that is not the case elsewhere. Christopher Ricks extracts much of his dazzling account of Clarendon’s History from the OED, which is on pretty open access. Anybody can look up ‘ingeminate, v.’ – but who else would dare to leap over a terrible pun (‘artificial ingemination’) to ...”

“... contributed to the science of literary interpretation.’ That certainly seems closer to Christopher Ricks than to Geoffrey Hartman. But James doesn’t say Sainte-Beuve had a horror of science, only of hardened, inflexible science, and James’s complaint against Taine, by contrast, is that he enjoys his simplifications rather than settles for ...”

“... character as philosophy and not to those qualities which literary critics have sometimes attacked. Christopher Ricks, for example, has castigated her prose style in Nuns and Soldiers for being spattered with such phrases as ‘a sort of’ or ‘a kind of’ (Sunday Times, 7 September 1980): but, although he has a point, it is less lethal against the ...”

“... this. ‘What else does one write criticism for except to win agreement?’ he asks in a letter to Christopher Ricks, and yet the winning of agreement – or perhaps the winning of too much agreement, the way literature coerced assent instead of opening argument – was the very thing that troubled Empson. Indeed, the thing Empson seems to have been most ...”

“... and has been appropriated by all kinds: sophisticated literary critics such as Aidan Day and Christopher Ricks, slob biographers such as Bob Spitz, genuine crazies like A. J. Weberman, who, as founder of the Dylan Liberation front, used to conduct seminars to his groupies on the Dylan family’s garbage; fervent hagiographers like Paul ...”

“... Amis became the piss-frothing Dylan Thomas’s literary executor? And what is this limerick about Christopher Ricks that Leader calls ‘unprintable’? These things we need to know. Or do ...”

“... it ‘celebrated and anatomised the ethic of mid-20th-century liberalism’, and, without doing a Christopher Ricks, who unnecessarily upgraded Bob Dylan’s songs to Great Poetry rather than the more-than-adequate great lyrics that they are, also wanted to claim that there was enough serious and educated thought behind the creation of the series to ...”

“... of the world’.Perhaps Johnson’s bravest critical act was that he always proved ready, as Christopher Ricks has observed, to acknowledge the limits of criticism itself. If it is ‘the task of criticism to establish principles; to improve opinion into knowledge’, it will also remain forever unable to explain or account for what the Rambler ...”

“... in order not to suffer much pain from the transition,’ Dorothy wrote home to their brother Christopher, ‘though we only went into the next room or down stairs for a few minutes.’ The Wordsworths had travelled to Germany in September, ostensibly to learn the language, but really because they had nothing better to do in England, and were happy to be ...”

“... thoughts of individuals and those of their societies – were in effect split in two.In 1963 Christopher Ricks developed from Empson’s essay on Milton the dazzling explosion of verbal energy that is Milton’s Grand Style. Ricks, a grammar school boy, came from a background far removed from Empson’s family ...”

“... of these matters. Mr Logan, on the evidence of style as well as content, is an adherent of Christopher Ricks, whose essay ‘In Theory’ (LRB, Vol.3, No 7) claimed Aristotle as an ally. He says that ‘Aristotle is to be believed’ when he observes that ‘it is the mark of an educated mind to expect that amount of exactness in each kind which ...”

“... in the study of literary influences, finding echoes of Macbeth in ‘Snake’ in a way that Christopher Ricks would find wholly unexceptionable. When he warms to his task, however, Chaudhuri’s commentary becomes genuinely groundbreaking and exciting. He is marvellous at tracing Lawrence’s snippings, pastings and graftings, the cut-outs and ...”

“... publishing, Clive James on the jazz criticism as well as the poems, Alan Brownjohn on the novels, Christopher Ricks on Larkin’s poetic style and structure, Seamus Heaney on his idealism, and others. But in this too, oddly enough, one can fail to find Larkin: because the desire to make tribute tends to move the stress towards the more public, more ...”

“... the century for scholars preparing to mark the centenary of The Waste Land’s publication. When Christopher Ricks reviewed Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Eliot in the LRB (1 November 1984; the same year Michael Hastings’s play about Eliot’s first marriage was staged), he remarked: ‘Plainly it is the Tom and Viv bits which we are all likely to ...”