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“... Earnestness is a brisk survey of a ‘tradition of thought’, a ‘mode of feeling’, which Fred Inglis identifies as English and, in a vague sense, socialist. The tradition is characterised by ‘a habit of recourse to concrete examples in argument, a calm refusal of formal metaphysics, an unexamined criticism of “over-abstraction” (which ...”

“... plain little building’ in the foothills of the Black Mountains. It is a comfortless day, Fred Inglis tells us. ‘The light fell crooked and the road fell wrong.’ Rooks caw speculatively on the wind, and the weather is appropriately Gothic too, a ‘bitter cold’ February day with ‘vicious showers of sleet and snow’. The mourners make ...”

“... barely a couple of months after his return. According to his own scarcely credible story (which Fred Inglis appears to take at face value in his new biography), he was accosted by an unknown American student outside Thornton’s bookshop on Broad Street and invited to sail with him and his student crew to Greece. He agreed; they left in June and ...”

“... for a biographer: they are a resource but also cast a shadow. This is certainly the case with Fred Inglis’s book, which leans very heavily on the autobiographical volumes. Anecdotes that Hoggart supplies in his measured style, the punchlines and angular phrases carefully spaced out, are retold by Inglis with ...”

“... But knowing is, of course, one thing, believing another. And what we most of us believe in is what Inglis in The Promise of Happiness calls ‘bibliotherapy’, the use of novels as not only propaedeutics but also as moral therapeutics. Theoretically, Inglis, like most of the other writers here, is against ...”

“... undefiled. Many learned books are now placing Leavis in an ‘English’ line of social thought. Fred Inglis’s Radical Earnestness has an explicit section on the English Mind; and he gets away with it because of his zany, fast-paced, name-dropping style, which puts Collingwood, Keynes and Leavis together as ‘decent herbivores’ who shun a ...”

“... At this point, another biographer set to work, but without access to Williams’s papers. Fred Inglis, whose cultural bloodline was ‘out of Leavisite literary criticism by New Leftish political conviction’, had written several books in educational theory and cultural studies, and he, too, had known and admired Williams. ...”

“... news conference and the same cricket match.’ The graceful preface by Alan Gilbert and Ken Inglis appears in each volume. It is pervaded by a belief in Australia as one community, however divided, and the temperate acceptance that the bicentennial beast would be friendly, or at least tractable. Among the important, long-lacked amenities it could ...”

“... three Northern Irish poets, he is a mellifluous teller of fairytales, though in a downbeat idiom. Fred D’Aguiar, meanwhile, who was born in London but brought up in Guyana, is ‘only’ 25. It shows a bit. The poems in English are awkward in syntax, uppity, rough at the edges. He writes more fluently in dialect, but not with the sing-song confidence of ...”