“... not blackshirts. But Karl Kraus and Joseph Roth had something to fear from their masses. When Thomas Mann condemns ‘the vulgarity of Hitler’ and laments, in his diaries, the ‘wretched, isolated, demented people, misled by a wild and stupid band of adventurers whom they take for mythical heroes’, is this an example of literary pride and prejudice ...”

“... villainy. 16 March. To St Etheldreda’s, Ely Place for the funeral of Anna Haycraft (aka Alice Thomas Ellis) who died a week or so ago in Wales and whose body had therefore to be brought down for the funeral and then presumably taken back to Wales to be buried beside Colin, her late husband, at their Welsh farmhouse. This, I gather, is pretty remote and ...”

“... the diverse poetries of Tennyson, Browning, Lewis Carroll, Christina Rossetti, Arnold, Hopkins, Hardy and Yeats. There are suggestive affiliations, as between Barnes and Hopkins, but no single narrative has explanatory power. A study of the emergence of modern poetry would need at least six lines of affiliation, by my count. More, if we included the ...”

“... other aspect is an aesthetic challenge: can anything explain why someone should, as the hero of Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon does, kill and rape his victims, insert shards of broken glass into their eyes and elsewhere, and then bite them with his grandmother’s false teeth? Wonder at the possible collapse of ways of explaining has always been a major part ...”

“... or not with the exclusion of common factuality. The two are not necessarily related. Consider Thomas Love Peacock. There the ordinary stuff of life is swept away to make room for abstract speculation. That, and just that, is the joke. It tickles our funny-bone to meet the denizens of Nightmare Abbey – young Scythrop, the heir of the house, and ...”

“... writer’s landscape? In Great Britain it’s common to refer to ‘Brontë country’ or ‘Hardy country’. The Lake District belongs to Wordsworth more than to any landowner. But ‘Hemingway country’? He lived in at least thirty parts of the United States, not to mention Cuba, Paris and the Riviera. Stephen Crane’s birthplace is now a ...”

“... in a fundamentally likeable way. Quite when the idea emerges Harris doesn’t say, but by the time Thomas Love Peacock was describing a group of ill-assorted travelling companions easing reluctantly into conversation in Headlong Hall, he was sure of raising a smile by making the topic on which they eventually settle ‘those various knotty points of ...”

“... it, and the principal reaction recorded here is petulance at being besieged by newsmen. One of Thomas Hardy’s friends or acquaintances, a man who went by the name of Clodd, is reported to have said of him: ‘He was a great writer but not a great man. There was no largeness of soul.’ It seems a very old-fashioned judgment – we prefer our heroes ...”

“... I still have my hand up. I want to know when Gunn first came across certain poems, elegies by Sir Thomas Wyatt for friends who were executed, that weren’t published until the early Sixties. They seem close in so many ways to the poems in the last section of The Man with Night Sweats. He referred to these poems in a book review. He obviously knows them ...”

“... over Zola, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson (1903) over Ibsen and, after Ibsen’s death, Paul Heyse over Hardy (1910). Ibsen had been friendly with Bjørnson and Heyse and knew what he was up against. No wonder he sought to engage with idealism more and more explicitly by depicting idealist characters in his work. His most programmatic anti-idealist play is The Wild ...”

“... His subject is an underworld within an underworld: certain followers of the proto-socialist Thomas Spence as they pursued their aims from the period of anti-Jacobin governmental action of the late 1790s, through Spa Fields, Peterloo and Cato Street, to the early years of Chartism. These men were not centre-stage in any of these events, nor were they in ...”

“... Donne, Marlowe, Herbert, Milton, Marvell, Pope, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, Hardy, Kipling, Yeats, Eliot, Larkin, Berryman, Stevens, Frost – all figure prominently. Much of what Ricks has to say on this score, especially in relation to what Dylan owes to the Bible (what ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ owes to Ezekiel, for ...”

“... who reckon they have a digestion for such things, in the way that that of Eliot, Pound, Yeats and Hardy has been, to say nothing of many a lesser figure. In what might be called the peripheral stakes Dylan Thomas and even David Jones have had more attention in some quarters – in the case of Dylan ...”

“... is fully and objectively told. This should surprise no one. If it took more than fifty years after Thomas Hardy’s death to get a satisfactory biography of Hardy, and more than seventy-five after Emily Dickinson’s death to get a satisfactory biography of Dickinson, the year 2040 doesn’t look too far off for the ...”

“... of the Light Brigade’. I was able to read the words as he spoke them and hear the crackles on Thomas Edison’s original wax cylinder recording. I was able to click through to Psalm 23, which finds its echo in the poem; able to learn how quickly Tennyson responded to Russell’s report of the battle in the Times; able to jump to Kipling’s response ...”