“... 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 ...”

“... than Thurber and much more distinguished. The Duke of Ferrara surely fathered Gilbert Osmond, Henry James’s lethal dilettante in The Portrait of a Lady: a man who at first represents ‘the artistic life’ to the naive heroine, but whose antiquarian talent proves in fact confined, in a penetrating image, to tracing the common coinage of the world ...”

“... opensA lane to the land of the dead.These vistas owe something to Auden’s first love, Thomas Hardy, and especially to what he described as Hardy’s way of ‘looking at life from a very great height’, his willingness ‘to see the individual life related not only to the local social life of its time, but to the ...”

“... any influence on early Blake in favour of ‘the traditional popular culture and Shakespeare’. Hardy makes ‘a style out of stylelessness’ in his poetry. ‘There is something extremely personal about the gauche unshrinking mismarriages – group-mismarriages – of his diction.’ Tennyson is ‘an Academy poet of genius’ who brought ‘English as ...”

“... but entirely satisfying acrobatic sequences of Harold Lloyd; and the pie-fight in a Laurel and Hardy two-reeler, where ‘the first pies were thrown thoughtfully, almost philosophically. Then innocent bystanders began to get caught into the vortex. At full pitch it was Armageddon.’ And yet, Agee says, with the memory of a connoisseur, almost to the end ...”

“... what might he have said about Melvyn Bragg’s sort of thing? There’s a famous bit in one of Henry James’s essays where he says that the trouble with periodical publication is that it’s like a train that has to leave the station every hour, according to the timetable, and if there are no genuine passengers then you have to put in dummies, so that the ...”

“... a momentous one. Had Her Majesty gone for another duff read, an early George Eliot, say, or a late Henry James, novice reader that she was she might have been put off reading for good and there would be no story to tell. Books, she would have thought, were work. As it was, with this one she soon became engrossed and, passing her bedroom that night clutching ...”

“... of the meaning. Larkin often tells her what he’s reading, and sometimes talks about his love of Hardy’s poetry or Lawrence’s novels (Lawrence is ‘so enormous, so shifty, so deceptive, fascinating, & evanescent’). He doesn’t discuss his enthusiasms in much detail, disappointingly, and though he writes of his liking for Samuel Butler (like ...”

“... tub-thumping in Balzac, alongside his sublime inventiveness, or the clumsy ineptitude to which Hardy can descend. In particular, it is a very perilous thing to rest much weight on the invariable quality of Defoe’s writing. The authors make a number of claims for his powers: they admire his ‘improvisatory’ sentences, by which they mean something like ...”

“... never one to rebel against her parents’ wishes, she broke the engagement. (The young man, Henry Cadogan, was drowned not long after her departure.) Freya was jilted by the Italian doctor to whom she became engaged during the First World War; and, according to her own account (though this has never been confirmed by the man’s family), she was cheated ...”

“... Stead seems to have been misremembering or paraphrasing a line of Virginia Woolf’s about Henry James) grew out of D.T. Max’s post-mortem profile of Wallace for the New Yorker, and is very much the version of his life as seen from Times Square. ‘Every story has a beginning and this is David Wallace’s’ is Max’s first sentence. It’s a funny ...”

“... biographies of novelists, and at his best when reviewing poetry. His essays on Sterne, Austen, Hardy, Trollope, Dickens, George Eliot and others begin incisively and then drift sideways, as critical argument is forsaken for biographical chatter and a widespread sowing of the field with puffed wheat. There is always a remarkably serene sense of what an ...”

“... surprising; more so in one of his generation is his strong support of Byron’s Don Juan. He likes Hardy – ‘Numb as a vane that cankers on its point/True to the wind that kissed ere canker came’ – and Housman: ‘Once in the wind of morning’ (though he is a bit uncomfortable about the homosexuality). He is anti-Yeats but pro-Somerville ...”

“... crushingly compact several reputations into the smallest space. ‘Logan [Pearsall Smith] said of Hardy’s second wife that she had tried first to get off with George Moore – or so he said. “George Moore would have said that of the Virgin Mary,” said B.B. [Berenson], “if he’d ever heard of her.” ’ But is it witty or humorous to predicate that ...”

“... yet published in England – but he is a poet of the originality and excellence of Larkin or Hardy or Frost, and in that same direct, humane, moving tradition. In his work I see – and through his work I have learned to see – how form and inspiration can and need to work off each other in any telling, any lasting, work. Perhaps I should elaborate with ...”