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“... to authors much lived with: acts of gratitude, however tough his assessments may be. Balzac, Browning, Hawthorne, Emerson, Flaubert, Maupassant, Stevenson all come in for this treatment, are covered, to use a recurring image of James’s, by the critic’s generous wings, sheltered in the imagination’s irony. The irony may help us in a current critical ...”

“... trick also licensed comparatively plain language, arhythmia and absence of rhyme in the manner of Christopher Reid’s pseudo-translations from a supposedly Eastern European language, Katerina Brac (1985). A further twist is introduced in God’s Gift to Women by ‘Candlebird’ (‘after’ the eighth-century Arabic poet Abbas Ibn al-Ahnaf), where a lover ...”

“... She was influenced by the work of Walter Pater, and by her friendships with Henry James, Robert Browning and John Singer Sargent. But she was never swayed to the extent that she relinquished her intellectual independence. An atheist and materialist, she had no time for contemporary flirtations with the occult. In 1885 she attended a meeting of the Society ...”

“... forms of criticism. Among the most deep and distinguished of this last kind of interpreter is Christopher Ricks, whose previous books include Milton’s Grand Style, Keats and Embarrassment, T.S. Eliot and Prejudice and Beckett’s Dying Words. Dylan’s Visions of Sin is the culmination of at least three decades’ critical engagement with the songs of ...”

“... the object of it was pursued by Greene with unusual persistency. She was Miss Vivien Dayrell-Browning, an entirely suitable young gentlewoman from the same upper-middle class background as Greene, who lived in Oxford with her mother and had published precocious little poems since the age of 13. The only unusual feature was her fervent Catholicism: she ...”

“... scholars – C.K. Stead, Ronald Bush, Julius himself – believe that the review was by Eliot. Christopher Ricks doesn’t disagree with this judgment – whether or not Eliot wrote the review, he observes in T.S. Eliot and Prejudice, it has ‘the stamp of his approval and the stamp of his tone’. Calling the anonymous notice ‘shameful’, Ricks ...”

“... high-minded disdain for their parents and the Vanity Fair of the Regency. Elizabeth Barrett Browning said that she would not wish even to touch Annabella’s hand, as if degeneracy were contagious. Prim young Florence Nightingale, who knew and liked Annabella, apparently felt the same. Horrified that Ada should have been buried at Newstead, she ...”

“... not worth living because of the existence of Carlyle, of Mr Ruskin, of Mr Holman Hunt, of Mr Browning, or of the gentleman who built the Crystal Palace.’ Life was not worth living because he knew, and everyone else knew, that he did not have it in him to build the next Crystal Palace. His response to this impossible demand was to develop an ‘almost ...”

“... and that is also written, in their various ways, by Fuller, by Michael Hofmann, Tom Paulin, Christopher Reid and others. Certainly the romantic rhetoric that is second nature to Larkin, as to Auden, Yeats and Eliot, has no place in their poetic repertoire. It once seemed so ‘natural’, but beside their literariness and air of non-communication it now ...”

“... a serious risk of substituting crabbed obscurity for an enigmatic richness of expression. Robert Browning’s 1877 version of Agamemnon is arguably more difficult to understand than the Greek:Not gently-grieving, not just doling outThe drops of expiation – no, nor tears distilled –Shall he we know of bring the hard aboutTo soft – that intense ireAt ...”

“... have an impact on him: the Joyce of Anna Livia Plurabelle (whose latter pages he had by heart), Browning, Negro spirituals, Cockney songs, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘bits of Welsh stuff … Norse sagas … and Lewis Carroll and Lear and God!’ And Eliot. He listened closely to the allusive mimicry of The Waste Land before setting out to do the war in ...”