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“... differently. He was convinced that he should have committed suicide years before. God, he wrote to Samuel Teedon in 1794, ‘considers me as a traytor, and acts towards me as he does, for that reason’. ‘I can hope nothing – believe nothing – I am and have long been the most miserable of the human race, and he knows it. Knows how ardently I wish that I ...”

“... a commodity, and writers mere ‘hands’. If he is worth reading it is not as an act of what Samuel Hynes calls ‘Victoriolatry’ but because he did make a world, and because, as he sometimes remarked, he could see the future. He wrote thirty-odd books, including a good one about Greece, a good one about Dickens, and the fantasised ...”

“... as a ‘strict and adult pen’. Elaborating on this, in his introduction to The Auden Generation, Samuel Hynes characterises the sought-after new art as follows: ‘Auden was urging a kind of writing that would be affective, immediate, concerned with ideas, moral not aesthetic in its central intention, and organised by that intention rather than by its ...”

“... to epistemology, ethics and aesthetics, cultural analysis and literary criticism, that, as Samuel Hynes observed, it is very difficult to see how the work could ever have cohered into a single enterprise. Each volume is hectic, overwritten, easily distracted and confusingly organised, fighting on several fronts at once. ‘It would be in your own ...”

“... be a four-year-long bloodbath: Never such innocence, Never before or since. And, more recently, Samuel Hynes’s magisterial A War Imagined (1990) argues that the generation of poets, painters and novelists who lived through the war ‘rejected the values of the society’ that had sent them to fight and rendered their ‘sense of a gap in ...”