“... According to Rebecca West, F. Tennyson Jesse was ‘ideally beautiful. I have never seen a lovelier girl.’ A sketch in Joanna Colenbrander’s biography shows a flat, winsome face with wide, rather fishy eyes; her thin limbs are splayed out with flapperish elegance. It may be that her attractions – a fat bundle of love-letters was destroyed when she died, and Mrs Colenbrander finds several witnesses to testify to her ‘aura’ – had less to do with ideal beauty than with loquaciousness and flair ...”

“... only real people in the world’.) Her second subject is the writer and criminologist Fryn Tennyson Jesse (great-niece of Alfred, Lord Tennyson), who lived in a cottage in St John’s Wood with her husband, Tottie, who liked to sunbathe naked in the garden. Fryn covered the Evans ...”

“... come to know Giuseppe Mazzini, Geraldine Jewsbury, John Forster, F.D. Maurice, Thackeray, Dickens, Tennyson, the Brownings, George Lewes (though Jane refused to have Mary Ann Evans in the house), Lady Harriet Baring and William Bingham Baring, Charles and Erasmus Darwin, Margaret Fuller, Ruskin, Ellen Twisleton, Margaret Oliphant, Froude: practically ...”

“... 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 does add up to a book, in fact a considerable one, it is artfully shaped as a study of bereavement and ...”

“... but these days his sentences sound forth as hoary pronouncements, less like Dickens and more like Alfred Lord Tennyson: speculative, morbid and poetic. Significantly, and most shockingly, there is no trace of bathos, that most common and undignified of modern effects, running beneath and below his lines. Indeed, in all the ...”

“... then someone had to rush out and bring him back. The joke was repeated, and the five-year-old Alfred was sent with him; but when the boys had got used to being rescued, Dickens changed the rules, closed the gate after them, and hid in the garden with some of the older children. In Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens, Robert ...”

“... The need was pressing, and the answer promptly came, trailing clouds of ectoplasm. Tennyson’s In Memoriam, an instant best-seller in 1850, won him the laureateship largely because its long sequence of troubled, plaintive lyrics, written over a span of 17 years, told a story and described a situation that struck home to countless readers: the sudden death of a beloved friend and the questions it raised about the immortality of the soul and the possibility of spiritual communion now and physical reunion in the hereafter ...”

“... dull of ancient days’ in Pope’s Dunciad), Cibber, Whitehead, Warton, Pye, Southey, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Austin, Bridges, Masefield, Day-Lewis, Betjeman ... In 1921 E.K. Broadus wrote a book, The Laureateship. After the First War there must have been a need in the public mind for some good official stuff, like Spring-Rice’s ‘I vow to thee, my ...”

“... summer of 1883 Laura joined a private cruise to Copenhagen with an illustrious party that included Tennyson and Gladstone. Her tone – lively, candid, romantic – and her cheerful, provoking sympathy for ‘all that’s bad’ made her the toast of the trip. When she contemplated leaving early, Tennyson was ...”

“... Officially this was The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations. Its contents, as Tennyson explained, were ‘Brought from under every star,/Blown from over every main’, but it was much more than a display of husbandry, ‘enginery’ and ‘secrets of the sullen mine’. Subtly, and rather mysteriously, the nation was brainwashed into ...”

“... of manhood: ‘It frightened mc so much,’ he confesses, ‘I could have killed her.’ Amy was Alfred Graves’s second wife. His first had died in 1886 leaving five motherless children, and Alfred seems to have felt anyone willing to undertake their upbringing would do. The marriage was loveless, though not particularly ...”

“... Graves applies a mild variety of the psychological technique favoured by so many biographers. ‘Alfred,’ he writes, ‘had been brought up by a weak father and a powerful mother, and it is reasonable to suppose that his unusually strong relationship with his mother had led to an early development of the more feminine aspects of his psychological make-up ...”

“... enthusing over Beethoven and Chopin; friends and family read aloud to one another – Browning, Tennyson, Dickens – as others embroidered, or they’d take Sir Walter Scott on ‘tramps’ through the mountains. For entertainment, there were church socials, dance halls, Firemen’s Balls, the Glee Club, community players: ‘I am going to play Susie in ...”

“... these seemingly sober, useful, self-deprecating sentences lurks the MacGuffin, to borrow Alfred Hitchcock’s term, that reaches its epic, mind-boggling climax in the publication, nearly a century on, of Faber’s two all-comprehending new tomes, edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue. The editors promise to ‘elucidate the difficulties’ of ...”

“... back to England to sell his work and to sustain relationships that remained important to him (with Alfred and Emily Tennyson, and with the Pre-Raphaelite painter William Holman Hunt, whom he would call ‘daddy’). Lear’s travel journals and letters are full of observations that could have made it into nonsense ...”