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“... onto the rougher, more English ground of Povington Hill. The heath still resembles the one Thomas Hardy imagined as Lear’s, but it is now part of the Royal Armoured Corps’s gunnery range: enclosed and blasted in a new sense. The road goes up past the turf-covered rings of Flower’s Barrow, and then turns off towards Worbarrow Bay. Along with the usual ...”

“... Poems show his unerring eye for weeding out both sorts. Then there is the diffident genius like Hardy, who could invent strong, distinctive characters like Sergeant Troy and Tess of the D’Urbervilles and the Mayor of Casterbridge, but was probably happier with the indeterminate sort, who flit uneasily in and out of the novel and transparently embody its ...”

“... features – the hands and clothes – are more distinctly Lavaterian in inspiration. (Barbara Hardy and John Carey have illuminatingly anatomised the significance of clothes as an index of character in Dickens and Thackeray, without invoking physiognomy.) But the truth is that after the effective build-up in the background chapters which comprise half of ...”

“... snobbish before, because otherwise we are missing a very great deal. It would be idle to deny that Hardy and Lawrence, and their readers, are not absorbed in the social position of Tess and Mellors and Lady Chatterley, as well as all its sexual and other implications. In order to perceive the writer’s attitudes, the reader has to get in with them and ...”

“... men are natural hypocrites who can enjoy being double. Their poetry, like their sex-lives, was for Hardy, for Frost or for Auden a thing apart, whereas for Plath it had to be her whole existence. My use of the Byronic tag – Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart, ’Tis woman’s whole existence – shows that recognition of the problem is not ...”

“... do not eat meat. The English are able to rule over us, because they are meat-eaters. You know how hardy I am, and how great a runner too. It is because I am a meat-eater. Meat-eaters do not have boils or tumours, and even if they sometimes happen to have any, these heal quickly.’ Gandhi then reflects on himself in comparison to the two meat-eaters he knows ...”

“... were as full of mud and blood and horrors and blunders as the long Somme agony was. A review of Henry Williamson’s book on the Somme by some hysterical nitwit claimed that all the good and brave and the potential leaders were annihilated, and apparently on the first day! Frightful as it was, one must remember that it was followed by the large-scale ...”

“... think they were a perfect pest.’ That would be collectively, so to speak. And HM’s couturier, Hardy Amies, outlined his attitude to women: ‘I like them as artistic figures, as a sculptor likes his clay, but on the whole I despise their minds.’ And to class: ‘I am a staunch supporter of the class system. I uphold it out of conviction; it’s the best ...”

“... snatches of poems and prose – which Rooney lists at the end of the novel – from Shakespeare, Hardy, Sontag and Yeats (Bobbi: ‘No one who likes Yeats is capable of human intimacy’). In place of simple sentences, Rooney uses fragments, drops articles, inverts conventional word order and quotes snatches of the canon. It’s not Ulysses, but it does have ...”

“... streets or travel on the highways. It was in the aftermath of the War of Austrian Succession that Henry Fielding, a Bow Street magistrate as well as a novelist and playwright, began forming the force that would come to be known by the unofficial title of the Bow Street Runners. Fielding the novelist was a tolerant chap who found small infringements of the law ...”

“... of the Twenties, Thirties and Forties. There are virtuoso pages like 71, where Henry James and Edmund Gosse bicycle through the text (‘Those were bicycle times ... The Time Machine with its saddle was itself a transfigured bicycle. Wells’s third novel The Wheels of Chance (1896), had been all about bicyclists’). The book offers a ...”

“... bed in the Hotel des Artistes, New York. Lisa St Aubin de Teran prefaces her book with notes from Henry Grew Crosby’s curriculum vitae, lest we should lose track of biography in the bravura of Josephine’s recital: but it is the recital that makes the book, the well-fashioned clusters of clauses clinging round the reiterated appeal to ...”

“... impressive, ambitious poem, to which he may have been assisted by translating Antonio Machado with Henry Gifford, pits itself against received English styles of verse. Resisting a native environment, ‘Up at La Serra’ survives a sense of having been willed into existence. Charles Tomlinson’s Collected Poems are the work of a man who has believed that by ...”

“... partly because she was ill, and partly because she discovered that May (who was by then married to Henry Sparling) was having an affair with George Bernard Shaw. Shaw moved into the couple’s house, which shocked Lily; she resigned and never saw May again. Meanwhile, Lolly began training as a Froebel teacher in 1889, and proved very successful: six years ...”

“... shall freely be given.’ The streak of fatalism that so pervades Thomas’s poetry has none of Hardy’s grim relish of life’s little ironies. Thomas’s settled melancholy, which on occasion would tip into severe bouts of depression, and in 1908 and 1913 almost drove him to suicide, undoubtedly found a release in the outbreak of war, which – along ...”