“... Britain was published in 1951 to coincide with the Festival of Britain. Brandt travelled from Hardy’s Wessex to Dr Johnson’s Skye; from Coleridge’s Keswick to George Crabbe’s Aldeburgh; from Blake’s cottage at Felpham to Emily Brontë’s Haworth (David Hockney raised objections when he discovered that for this picture Brandt had spliced ...”

“... something spectacular was being planned, involving serious rioting and the burning in effigy of Henry Dundas, the home secretary and unofficial ‘king’ of Scotland. On the afternoon of 5 June an effigy of Dundas was carried into George Square and set alight outside the house of his mother, Lady Arniston. Despite the intervention of troops, who were ...”

“... more respectable than shop assistants. They wore fine clothes on their protest marches. ‘Hardy, opinionated New England women with strong ideas contended throughout the 19th century with each other and with working men over issues of work, family and protest.’ Blewett’s analysis ‘challenges the way that male gender has unconsciously been made ...”

“... art of fiction.’ This remark probably arose from his habitual disrespect for, or worry about, Henry James. The Ambassadors is given more attention in Aspects of the Novel than any other novel, except possibly Gide’s Les Faux-Monnayeurs, though the intention is in neither case to praise or to admire; and the Commonplace Book contains mildly disparaging ...”

“... why it always needed to be so cold in the house of the Lord. From the top, Seamus quoted Thomas Hardy – ‘The Darkling Thrush, 31 December 1900’. He spoke of a visit he and his wife, Marie, made to Stinsford churchyard on Hogmanay in the year 2000.‘The new millennium,’ I said.MILLER: The poem’s first title was ‘The Century’s ...”

“... the book is constructed in a series of emotional confrontations, the chapters being given (as in Henry James’s ‘dramatic’ novel, The Awkward Age) the names of the leading actors in each, and the ‘awkward age’ being in this case nearer 67 than 17. The plot concerns retirement and homecoming, ending and reconciliation, and the Welsh setting as Amis ...”

“... been expected to see the mountains on the other side.Two years before Addison took office Thomas Hardy died, and voices were raised in Westminster Abbey, invoking his own invocation of the Wessex countryside:Precisely at this transitional point of its nightly roll into darkness the great and particular glory of the Egdon waste began, and nobody could be said ...”

“... melancholy, and sadness, and nostalgia, and to what Turgenev, and what Jane Austen, and what Hardy, could tell us about these things, and I, after a silence that I had kept for twenty minutes or so, plucked up my courage to bare my soul to the company around the table, and I said that I knew nothing more melancholy than sun after rain on a suburban ...”