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“... of anecdotes and an enviable spontaneous wit besides. I was working with him at the time when Henry VIII’s flagship the Mary Rose was being laboriously raised from the depths of the Solent. This was being done by means of a cradle when suddenly a cable snapped and the wreck slipped back into the water.‘Ah,’ said Richard. ‘A slight hiccup on the ...”

“... Nietzschean scepticism of the intellect helped to secure his place in the Great Tradition’, Hardy’s quaint metaphysics and homespun philosophising guaranteed his implacable exclusion from it. T.S. Eliot’s celebrated comment on Henry James – ‘a mind so fine that no idea can violate it’ – sounds like a ...”

“... acquired ‘classic’ status, they were not easily displaced. Defoe, Swift, Scott, Dickens, Hardy figure in almost every story of a life transformed by reading, along with the major poets (Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson), dramatists (none matched Shakespeare and Shaw in popularity), discursive prose writers (Carlyle and Ruskin are the constant companions ...”

“... Known World (2003), owes something to The Mayor of Casterbridge: in it he broods knowingly, like Hardy, over the faces of his creations; and like The Mayor of Casterbridge, it engineers a highly ironic machinery of repetition and guarantee. It opens with a description of the dying days of Henry Townsend, a black farmer and ...”

“... then will the winter be? Lawrence wasn’t alone in forecasting the unravelling of everything. Hardy wrote in 1914 of his feeling ‘that we are living in a more brutal age than that, say, of Elizabeth’, which ‘does not inspire one to write hopeful poetry, or even conjectural prose, but simply make[s] one sit still in an apathy, and watch the clock ...”

“... on, among others, Scott, Carlyle, Dickens, Trollope, Clough, Hawthorne, Browning, George Eliot, Hardy, Arnold and Henry James. In many cases, the editors have singled out Hutton in their introductions as outstandingly shrewd and appreciative among contemporary critics. We clearly need to have a new selection of his best ...”

“... clumsily done, led to the arena becoming an embarrassing lake for some years. By the time Thomas Hardy arrived in the city, already trained as an architect whose sympathies lay with William Morris (‘we are only trustees for those who come after’), the rebuilding of Rome, now the confident capital of Italy, had torn away the ancient fabric, leaving no ...”

“... mute are given a say in things,’ Kipling does not, of course, stop short at human beings. Henry James, who admired – indeed adored – him, deprecated this process nonetheless, and in a famous comment once observed that he had abandoned humans for horses, dogs, locomotives and parts of ships. Kipling did give a voice of sorts to all these, and by no ...”

“... One will look at the books in the rack with a new respect now that one knows their origins in Henry James and Nietzsche. The principle on which Mills & Boon runs its list is that the imprint is always greater than the author. Over the years, the firm has built up a stable of romancers several of whom (like Jean S. Macleod) have a hundred or more titles to ...”

“... incidents during the Blitz, mostly kept out of the news at the time. Several hundred of those whom Henry Moore ennobled in his wartime drawings of shelterers in the Tube were crushed, drowned or suffocated in catastrophes at Marble Arch, Balham, Bank and Bethnal Green. In 1975 there was the macabre case of Driver Newson, who careered full force into the ...”

“... much happens in Suffolk, or if it did then it happened a long time ago. ‘Very quiet here,’ Hardy wrote to his sister from Aldeburgh. ‘Whole town rather solitary,’ Carlyle said. (These details are lifted from Ronald Blythe’s The Time by the Sea: Aldeburgh 1955-58, an account of years spent with Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears and E.M. Forster on the ...”

“... then 62-year-old wanted to reread before he died. (He supplemented this list with the Australians Henry Handel Richardson and Martin Boyd as well as the Hungarian Gyula Illyés; references in his work suggest that Hardy, Lawrence and Nabokov have also occupied his attention significantly. He seems to loathe Norman Mailer ...”

“... men weren’t and that one reason sodomy remained a capital offence was the absence of anyone ‘hardy enough to undertake what might be represented as the defence of such a crime’. There was also a petition organised by Pratt’s wife, Elizabeth, signed by 55 respectable citizens, including – and this seems to fit my picture of them – the ...”

“... in these pages, along with such recognised poets of high accomplishment as Gavin Ewart and Henry Reed, Norman Cameron and Robert Garioch, Roy Fuller, Hamish Henderson and Sorley Maclean – and many others wholly unknown to fame. It’s true that sensitive annotation of individual experience was the hallmark of their generation of writers. Owen and ...”

“... bas-relief. His brain infolded, mimicking its strata. The title of his book comes from a study of Henry Moore, Sculpture in the Making: ‘As a young man Moore preferred to use native stones, believing that as an Englishman he should understand them.’ Craig often refers to Moore in the book, and near its conclusion writes that Moore’s sculptures tell him ...”