“... 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 ...”

“... Donne’s family​ were devout and prominent Roman Catholics, related on his mother’s side to Thomas More. Two uncles became Jesuit priests; one of them, Jasper Heywood, was briefly the leader of the Jesuit mission in England. In 1593 Donne’s brother Henry was arrested for harbouring a priest, and died of the plague in prison; the priest was ...”

“... to remember writing some dark allegorical story.Poems?No. I’d written odd poems, very sub-Dylan Thomas. I remember having or buying Thomas’s Collected Poems. I liked the whole idea of him so anything I wrote sort of resembled him, though I pretended it didn’t.Were you working quite hard in the sixth form for your ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... fact-gathering overcomes his efforts to sanctify his subject. As a boy Wallace started out reading Hardy Boys mysteries and science fiction like Frank Herbert’s Dune; by the age of 11 he was mowing a neighbour’s lawn in exchange for a tutorial on Stendhal. It was around this time that his parents gave him his own television set. He watched ...”

“... at a later date, tunic pockets. In a 1910 lecture on Swinburne, Housman recollected being told by Hardy that when he was a young man in London ‘there was a whole army of young men like himself, not mutually acquainted, who nevertheless, as they met in the streets, could recognise one another as spiritual brethren by a certain outward sign. This sign was an ...”

“... characters appeared on the stage.’ Moorcroft Wilson – who has written biographies of Edward Thomas, Isaac Rosenberg and Sassoon – has a carefully forensic style, and tends to rely on remarks by Graves’s contemporaries to convey his character. She has such a store of these that one does get from the book a sense of what a fusion of confusions he ...”

“... only thrive on big cities?’ It would not, of course, be a question meant to be taken seriously. Hardy, Gogol, Twain, Jane Austen, Synge, Hawthorne. But – it may as well be said at once – the adjective ‘great’ and its noun ‘greatness’ do occur too often in this otherwise wholly admirable book. Punches are pulled. Patent failures like the early ...”

“... from the after-effects of a childhood cricket injury.Biographers of Grey, including the latest, Thomas Otte, have taken these three incidents in their stride, granting them a few incurious sentences at most. Instead they have dwelled on Grey’s love of homely nature: his passion for fly-fishing and bird-watching, his long weekends in Hampshire, his ...”

“... the pastiche Auden; Auden’s influence was shared by the Golden Treasury, and superseded by Dylan Thomas and other romantics, Yeats becoming prime among them; and Yeats was finally driven out by Hardy. Yet even after the poet had found his style, he continued to write sometimes highly competent verses that ...”

“... with Levan in New York before taking a residency at the Warehouse in Chicago, along with DJ Ron Hardy. As Chicago music-makers like Marshall Jefferson, Farley ‘Jackmaster’ Funk and Joe Smooth started making records that filled the dancefloor there, so, locally, their music began to be described as having a ‘Warehouse’ or, simply, a ...”

“... which has several parallels in Pym novels, though this poetry has no place for Pym’s humour. Hardy or Betjeman would not have put things thus, one feels: poets who are men tend to make use of compassion in such a context, and to leave it surrounded with their own sort of insulation. Yet it may be that certain styles of insulation are proper and necessary ...”

“... with an astrological projection of its subject, written by Houellebecq’s friend Françoise Hardy, the 1960s pop star. At one point, Houellebecq thought of adding his own footnotes to Demonpion’s text, but negotiations between the two broke down. This collaboration would have made the biography more interesting, but might also have muddied the ...”

“... have 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 ...”

“... his great contemporary rival Tennyson, and the principal 20th-century poets, including even Yeats, Hardy and Wallace Stevens, let alone the various fashionable Modernists whose reputations are now rightly in rapid decline.’Such an estimate may do justice to the scale of Browning’s work. Whether it comes to terms with Browning’s actual identity as a poet ...”