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“... The otherwise excellent ‘The Birthplace’, with its evocation of another ‘familiar ghost’, Thomas Hardy –The corncrake in the aftergrassverified himself, and I heardroosters and dogs, the very sameas if he had written them –is marred by an arbitrary/obligatory sex-scene ‘in a deep lane that was sexual/with ferns and ...”

“... classical scholars who had received them, admiring the attitude of the 17th-century Greek scholar Thomas Gataker who refused a Cambridge doctorate because ‘like Cato the censor he would rather have people ask why he had no statue than why he had one.’ When he came across some self-critical words of T.E. Lawrence in Seven Pillars of Wisdom – ‘there was ...”

“... music’, have the added interest for students of literature of providing extended footnotes to Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge. ‘Rough Music’ is a wonderfully wide-ranging study of the shaming ritual, broadly approximating to the French charivari, known as the skimmington or (as the Casterbridge folk call it) the ‘skimmity-ride’. Such ...”

“... countryside, the English sense of humour, the English love of fair play.’ William Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy and Edward Elgar were brought forth to prove that the roots of British character lay deep in the countryside, and were still healthy despite the enervating effects of urban life. Yet to anyone who took the trouble to look dispassionately it was ...”

“... and again on page four. This is surely how it should be. West Country villages – if we follow Thomas Hardy – have enough tragedy of their own, enough worry, without having to deal with the committal hearing of a Rosemary West, whose charge-sheet, if proved true, could make her the most gruesome female killer Britain has ever known. Those charges ...”

“... glamour and splendour. Among the more solid figures who appear on this stage from time to time are Thomas Hardy, visited more than once in Dorchester: Tea at Max Gate. Lady Stacie there, a descendant of R.B. Sheridan – and a fashionable lady, formerly a great beauty. She gushed to T.H. about his novels at the tea-table. He shut her up by saying ‘I am ...”

“... But presumably that is another desired effect in this uneasy novel. As used to be said of Thomas Hardy, Wilson turns his screw of misery once too often. The end of the novel has Giles alone: a Milton, Oedipus or Lear without even a daughter by his side (and Tibba’s devirgination is anyway imminent). Miss Agar has been turned away. The great ...”

“... write novels,’ he wrote (again, though, not to Amis), novels that would be ‘a mix of Lawrence, Thomas Hardy and George Eliot’. In order to achieve this aim, he is already shaping up to distance himself from enfeebling human attachments: ‘I find that once I “give in” to another person ... there is a slackening and dulling of the peculiar ...”

“... It is an indication of her independence of mind that among the influences she admitted we find Thomas Hardy, whose poetry, on the face of it, belonged to another age: she took what she wanted wherever it came from. Yet she very well understood the modern American virtues of Williams, Stevens, Cummings, Eliot, Pound, Kenneth Burke and Yvor ...”

“... story. It isn’t clear why Riley has included this episode unless it’s to hammer home that Thomas Hardy matters more to Natalie and Joshua than Dick Cheney, because they are types of the self-absorbed young writer; there’s no need, really, to interrupt their story in order to compensate for it. Back at the hotel, Natalie and Joshua lie in ...”

“... the nature of expatriation, its enabling and disabling propensities. Of his one perverse book, Thomas Hardy and British Poetry, he good-naturedly acknowledges that ‘it never makes up its mind whether it’s addressing the American reader or the British reader, and part of the time it is castigating the Americans for not being British, and the rest ...”

“... love, as in Romans 6:9 where death ‘hath no more dominion’, a tyrant deposed by Christ. Dylan Thomas made a poem from this bit of scripture, joined to the hope that ‘Though lovers be lost love shall not’ – a secular prayer also given expression in Larkin’s ‘An Arundel Tomb’. Among extinction’s consolations, the fiction of the afterlife ...”

“... In August 1867, Thomas Carlyle published one of his most virulent diatribes against ‘swarmery’, by which he meant the trend towards democracy. The immediate inspiration for ‘Shooting Niagara: and After?’ was the threat of Disraeli’s Reform Act, which would double the number of adult males entitled to vote, and thus, as Carlyle saw it, unleash untold ‘new supplies of blockheadism, gullibility, bribability, [and] amenability to beer and balderdash’: look at America, the beleaguered Sage of Chelsea argued, and its absurd Civil War, prompted by what he derisively called ‘the Nigger Question’: Essentially the Nigger Question was one of the smallest; and in itself did not much concern mankind in the present time of struggles and hurries ...”

“... A year later, ignoring good legal advice to be content with a charge of sedition, Scott prosecuted Thomas Hardy for treason in the first of the 1794 trials. At a time when a treason trial normally took only one day, Scott opened the prosecution case with a speech that lasted nine hours. ‘Nine hours,’ the former lord chancellor Thurlow ...”

“... omissions of J.H. Prynne and Roy Fisher, heroes of Davie’s earlier study of the contemporary, Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (1973)? In a book whose title claims centrality for Bunting, a writer who signally amalgamated Wordsworthian English Romanticism and Poundian, American-internationalist Modernism, it is bizarre not to have these English ...”