“... What are days for?’ asks a poem in The Whitsun Weddings. It’s a good opening line, with that abruptness and immediacy most Larkin openings have. And it’s a good question, making it plain – among other things – that living is not really what poems do: they only chart the results of asking questions like these, bringing        the priest and the doctor In their long coats Running over the fields ...”

“... BBC Radio has started a pleasant practice of filling the Christmas season with murder plays, mostly dramatised detective stories from the classic English phase of the 1920s and 1930s. This joining of the festive with the lethal provokes thought. There may well be some long line in English culture that links the Christmas visit to The Mousetrap with a point at least as far back as that splendid moment in Medieval literature when the Green Knight, his head cut off, stoops to pick up the rolling object, and rides out of Arthur’s Christmas Court with the head lifted high and turned in the hand to smile genially here and there at the gathered knights and ladies as he goes ...”

“... Few discussions of literary obscurity fail to come to a climax with a story written by Kipling in the early 1900s, ‘Mrs Bathurst’. Conversely, most general critical treatments of the writer sooner or later brace themselves to try to explain what is going on in it. Excellent work has emerged from the process – Kipling can bring the best out of the good critic, and possibly the worst out of the bad ...”

“... James Thurber’s best-known cartoon has an impassive little man introducing his spouse to a dazed friend with ‘That’s My First Wife Up There, and This Is the Present Mrs Harris.’ The first Mrs Harris seems to be crouched on all fours on the top of a very high (glazed) bookcase, just behind the second Mrs Harris. This image has found an appreciative audience even among those not particularly interested in American humour of the 1930s ...”

“... studies, and it hovers over much of this book. Five of the essays, including a splendid piece by Barbara Everett on epic catalogues, are on Milton. Eliot made a major contribution to the ‘dislodgement’ of Milton, but Milton studies never even faltered. Indeed, important books like Ricks’s Milton’s Grand Style were conceived of as counterblasts ...”

“... the subject and manner of his poems. In a well-argued investigation of ‘The Sense of Nothing’, Barbara Everett tackles the central paradoxical situation of Rochester’s equilibrist act, balancing in his poetry with infinite elegance over the void that underlies existence. Her most important evidence is ‘Upon Nothing’, a terrifyingly laconic ...”

“... Barbara Everett’s book consists of her four Northcliffe Lectures, given at University College London in 1988, on Hamlet and the other ‘major’ tragedies, together with a number of shorter pieces on Romeo and Juliet, Troilus and Cressida, Othello, Twelfth Night, and quite a lot more about Hamlet. This account may make the book sound scrappy, but it holds together ...”

“... I mention these paradoxes, not from any immediate desire to resolve them, but to suggest that Barbara Everett’s essays are on the face of it untimely. For what she attempts is impossible to anybody who declines, or is unable, to write well: her whole mode of proceeding depends on doing so. Yet she also appears to believe that in some rather ...”

“... got from the French poets, especially Mallarmé. In her essay ‘Philip Larkin: After Symbolism’ Barbara Everett has pointed out these French, echoes: the fact that, for example, ‘Sympathy in White Major’ is a kind of symbolist parody of Gautier’s ‘Symphonie en Blanc Majeur’, and ‘Arrivals, Departures’ echoes Baudelaire’s ‘Le ...”

“... ruin anything. ‘Even his most elegant verse often resounds with the crash of breaking glass,’ Barbara Everett wrote. Germaine Greer called him ‘a poet against his better judgment’, drawn time and again to commit ‘catastrophic indiscretions’ in verse. (Sometimes there was actual broken glass: in the summer of 1675, with a group of friends, he ...”

“... put into my head by Anthony Thwaite’s selection of the poet’s letters. Booth, together with Barbara Everett, is among the few critics who have produced real illumination about the way the poems work: ways of working which notoriously have become more and more indefinable the more public and popular a figure the poet has become – and indeed the ...”

“... all forms of literary adventure.’ (‘All’ forms of literary adventure seems less than fair.) Barbara Everett is quoted taking a different view: ‘Larkin’s great art is to appear to achieve the literal while in fact doing something other.’ ‘Achieving the literal’ may sound a little unidiomatic, but it properly places the emphasis on the ...”

“... does at last manage to perceive the hard-won literary form of a book, only to suggest – as Barbara Everett suggested about a book of criticism in these pages a few weeks ago – that the form is ‘perhaps not entirely conscious’. Some of the reviewers of Old Glory misjudged its tone and content along with its form. In an early chapter Raban ...”

“... coexisting but only seemingly united.’ The novel ends, by contrast, with a real union, what Barbara Everett, quoted by Tandon, calls ‘Hard Romance’ – a relationship ‘hard to destroy and hard to achieve’. The beauty of this marriage solution is that it exists beyond the circle of the book: ‘Its crowning double irony is its ...”

“... to call it ‘mature’; but if it is any good then perhaps it is ‘good’ in the way that, as Barbara Everett once remarked in these pages, people (such as Leavis) say that Keats’s ‘To Autumn’ is good: ‘in the way that a child will be called “good”, when what is really meant is that its spirit is broken’.† Auden was not the only ...”