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“... Carlos Williams, had ever existed. Who now are the Old Masters? Larkin, of course; early Auden; Hardy; Tennyson; Thomas Hood (in a certain quarter); Byron and Shelley at their most playful. But the presence of the Great Modernists feels as remote and irrelevant as that of Edward Marsh’s Georgians.Larkin, the lonely ...”

“... while another Hals painting, The Singing Boys (c.1623-27), adorns the companion volume, Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture. The Singing Boys is no doubt meant to recall Middleton’s early work for the Children of Paul’s, one of those boy companies whose performances were punctuated by songs and entr’acte music; but the fleshly ...”

“... spontaneous. The poems are functions of a native language, gifts of English as defined, say, by Hardy and Edward Thomas, but when we’re reading them we don’t think of them in that way: we think of them as translucent to what they have perceived and only verbal in the last resort and by the way. Even in ‘The Whole ...”

“... position himself. Among the list of influences he cites are the Goncourt brothers, Emily Brontë, Hardy, Tolstoy and Thomas Browne. He’s quick to see the merits of Joyce, praising Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man for its truth-telling and enviously tracking the progress of Ulysses when it is serialised in the Little ...”

“... their staffs for alpenstocks, eager to lift up their eyes to the hills, or like the Rev. J.F. Hardy, to sing the National Anthem atop the Lyskamm, with ‘happy thoughts of home and fatherland’. The helpful files of the Times show that the Rev. Charles Hudson, the Matterhorn casualty, had spent rigorous months hardening himself on many an Alpine ...”

“... as cultivation and building disturb the electrical currents in the surrounding atmosphere, while Hardy W. Campbell, billed in the Milwaukee Road pamphlets as ‘the noted farming expert and inventor of the Campbell system of scientific farming for semi-arid lands’, had shown how to make dry soil fertile: compact the soil at root level, then break up the ...”

“... are the poems bad, unaware (Ronald-like?) or puny that the best among them – Gurney’s, Edward Thomas’s, Owen’s – rise from the shared world of trench-mud with astonishing freshness. And Gurney, at least, would have approved Taylor’s chosen prelude, a poem by that patron of all things common, Walt Whitman, whose work he appears to have encountered ...”

“... he was 17, Britten went to church in Lowestoft and heard ‘quite a fine sermon’ by the Rev. Thomas Henry Stanley, who was standing in for the incumbent, the Rev. William Reeve. Reeve was away – in case you care, he was in Blankenberghe, Belgium. On August Bank Holiday in that year Britten went to see a show with Paul Robeson in it; a supporting act ...”

“... a celebration of hip and chaotic capitalism. It is written in the regulation giddy style that Thomas Frank and the Baffler school in Chicago have dissected so well. Once again we are presented with the lives of the saints of middle management, Leadbeater’s magnificent pilgrims are full of daring. They struggle for personal fulfilment and venture ...”

“... promises, the creative writers Marlowe, Donne, Clarendon, Crabbe, Austen, George Eliot, Lowell and Hardy; the historian Clarendon, the philosopher Austin and the biographers Gaskell, Froude and Hallam Tennyson; and, throughout, the line of great dead critics – Johnson, Coleridge, Arnold, T.S. Eliot, Trilling and Donald Davie. If, as I believe, this volume ...”

“... library (the Bible, Prayer Book and The Pilgrim’s Progress) ‘Prime old Tusser’ – Thomas Tusser’s A Hundreth Good Pointes of Husbandrie, first published in 1557. As towns grew, so did the need for market gardens to feed their inhabitants. Willes emphasises how much the commercialisation of food, the expansion of markets and the nursery trade ...”

“... think they were a perfect pest.’ That would be collectively, so to speak. And HM’s couturier, Hardy Amies, outlined his attitude to women: ‘I like them as artistic figures, as a sculptor likes his clay, but on the whole I despise their minds.’ And to class: ‘I am a staunch supporter of the class system. I uphold it out of conviction; it’s the best ...”

“... what he set out to do as a serious youngster devoted to the piano, classical as well as jazz.Thomas ‘Fats’ Waller – ‘Tom’ or ‘Thomas’ to his friends and family – had formidable technique, akin to a great athlete’s, and an exhaustless inventiveness and capacity to delight. His articulation of notes was ...”

“... Rutherford’s gathering of previously unpublished or uncollected early poems, and Professor Thomas Pinney’s selection from the early journalism: special reports, feature articles, social notes, reviews and comic sketches written for the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette between 1884 and 1888. Both editors acknowledge the rawness of the work they have ...”

“... awkward births in frostbitten fields. Still, it hasn’t quite got to the state of Dorset after Hardy, when the county started playing itself as depicted in the novels.4 February. Slightly wish I’d lightened my griping about arthritis with a reminiscence of my great-uncle Norris, included in an earlier memoir but no worse for that. Uncle Norris was, I ...”