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“... little and too lately known’. Dryden’s poem has been much admired and praised – but not by Claude Rawson, who calls it variously ‘pompous’, ‘self-serving’, ‘overrated’, ‘unctuously self-exalting’, ‘self-promoting’, ‘pontifical’ and ‘patronising’ Item: in a chapter on Richardson (wittily called ...”

“... only to upbraid such notions as imperialist. ‘We are obsessed with “barbarians”,’ Claude Rawson remarks in this erudite, passionate book; but by ‘we’ he seems to be thinking of literary critics, not grapepickers or hairdressers. The good news is that the Home Counties view of literature has now been decisively despatched. The native ...”

“... Not Malcolm Bowie of Queen Mary College, London (‘all in a splendid surge of creativity’); not Claude Rawson of the University of Warwick (‘no doubt of the power ... at the acute cutting edge of feeling’); not Elaine Feinstein, from Cambridge (‘the talent is unmistakable’). The truth is that Swansongs should never have been published. As much ...”

“... Rogers’s scholarship would have it survive in both respects, topical and formal. Pat Rogers and Claude Rawson write about many of the same 18th-century books, but they deal with them in quite different ways. Unlike Rogers, Rawson doesn’t spend much scholarly time in ‘that lowest of all high places, the Grub ...”

“... eager for their applause. In this collection of essays he has a chameleon presence. He is seen by Claude Rawson as a fluent parodist in the Augustan mode, and by Carolyn Williams as a pioneer of post-colonial resistance to the hegemony of Received Standard English. As several essays here make clear, he is the poet who, above all others, forced the early ...”

“... Swift as a political thinker, without discounting the pressures of sheer contingency all his life. Claude Rawson has revised his ‘Focus’ collection of pieces on Swift (1971) as The Character of Swift’s Satire: ten essays on many aspects of Swift’s life and work, with the contributors including Ian Watt, Pat Rogers, and Ehrenpreis (on Swift’s ...”

“... twice to an author of a book called Order from Confusion Sprung, and this author he names as ‘Claude Rogers’. Now, the real author’s name is Claude Rawson, and Professor Rawson is a very well-known critic of 18th-century literature. Is this a piece of satire or sly invective ...”

“... the unhistorical character of the biblical report does not entirely relieve it of culpability. As Claude Rawson persuasively argues in God, Gulliver and Genocide, once a writer puts forward a vision of total destruction, however fantastic the context, a toxic element has been released into the intellectual atmosphere that, though not a direct cause of ...”

“... of Watergate dimensions. David Lehman’s Signs of the Times – reviewed here not long ago by Claude Rawson – is a narrative and meditation on the same subject. The tone is less enjoyably sarcastic than Kimball’s, but Lehman too is convinced that the de Man case is symptomatic of a higher education which has gone to hell. The familiar quotations ...”

“... defender of good causes, nor the demonic xenophobe or misogynist of some postcolonial opinion,’ Claude Rawson wrote in God, Gulliver and Genocide (2001): ‘Still less is he a holder, in Empson’s phrase, of “some wise balanced position between them”.’ It’s remarkable, in the light of all this, that Swift’s 20th-century biographers ...”

“... place of Rest and Refreshment’. In more recent times, humanist critics like Pat Rogers and Claude Rawson have explored the unfrequented alleys of Grub Street and examined the Augustan ideal ‘under stress’. Indeed the word ‘new’ in the title of this book owes more to the Madison Avenue hype of corporate America than to serious literary ...”

“... this after six chapters of preliminary and necessary throat-clearing. True to his briefing from Claude Rawson as general editor, Makin doesn’t restrict himself to summarising what previous commentators have uncovered (though he’s good at that, scrupulous and thorough – for instance, noting German and Italian writing as well as English), but he ...”