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“... of us, and make us so strong, so happy, so sure of ourselves, so crowded with fruitful memories of joy that we may be able to live in towns or earn our living at some drudgery and yet create whole and pure joy for others.’ He survived the war, living or partly living until the end of 1937, only to be cheated by ...”

“... In reviewing The Spire, I was trying to get at this quality when I compared the novel to Vaughan Williams, and especially to Job, and I still think the comparison useful: Blake’s rifacimento of the Bible itself transformed in an idiosyncratic modal music with saxophones thrown in. But the tone of these essays has less heroic antecedents. It brings to mind ...”

“... by D.A. West. West and Nicholas Horsfall are each represented by three contributions, as is R.D. Williams. E.L. Harrison figures twice. Some of the essays are celebrated: such as G.N. Knauer’s summary, dated 1964, of the textual and structural relations between the Homeric epics and the Aeneid. Other papers are of a more specialised interest: they include ...”

“... William Walton (1902) and Lennox Berkeley (1903), with the reassuring presence of Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872) hovering over them all. Whether Tippett ever entered the pantheon, or even deserves to, remains an open question for some. His Concerto for Double String Orchestra (1939) might slot seamlessly into a concert programme of English string pieces like ...”

“... consciously controlled professional technique. It was a struggle away from everything Vaughan Williams seemed to stand for.’ Vaughan Williams taught composition at the RCM, but Britten bypassed him anyway. Since the age of 14 he had been having lessons with Frank Bridge; his mother would take him to London in the ...”

“... anxiously lurk beneath the poem’s surface, desperate to be confessed. It wasn’t until he met Williams in 1950 that he realised poetry could be written in everyday English, and then he immediately went to the opposite extreme, writing flat monochrome slabs describing New Jersey sewage works and factories. ...”

“... of work in progress. The leading members of the group, which included the Anglican writer Charles Williams during the years of the Second World War, also seem to have shared a form of conservatism – one with Tory anarchist leanings – that was more cultural than political (and was the more conservative for seeing itself as apolitical). Tolkien and Lewis ...”

“... road with his golf club in a shamefully ludicrous way. At Llanstephan on the coast there is Uncle Williams whose lower jaw was shot away during World War One: he wears a mask with a tube protruding from his right nostril to be fixed behind his ear, and down this tube Auntie Williams gently pours gruel to feed him, while she ...”

“... Kipling modelled some of his ‘Barrack-Room Ballads’ on the songs he heard there. Bransby Williams delivered monologues from Shakespeare, Fielding and Dickens and bridged the gap between music hall and legitimate theatre by impersonating various leading actors of the day. To consummate this marriage of high and low, he would sometimes impersonate ...”

“... and his friends. He also wrote a powerful novel of social protest, Things As They Are, or Caleb Williams, in which the central characters, Falkland and Caleb, master and man, act out the mutually destructive relationship forced on them in their hierarchical society. Godwin’s academic personality and style are misleading, for the revolutionary years at any ...”

“... round keen on winning. His dismay at Bunny Austin’s defeat at Wimbledon is compensated by his joy at belatedly discovering squash. Nor did he scorn team games (cricket, football). It is barely possible not to wonder how he could combine these healthy interests with his pleasure in musical comedies, his exhausting schedule of rehearsal and practice ...”

“... a charming woman who wrote wry nostalgic sketches to a major figure in Victorian studies. Raymond Williams jump-started this re-evaluation in 1958, when he described her first novel, Mary Barton, as ‘the most moving response in literature to the industrial suffering of the 1840s’. Although Williams went on to complain ...”

“... draining of meaning from our lives. The projects we previously valued would cease to matter. Joy and happiness would evade us. We would be overtaken, as James puts it in her novel, by an ennui universel. This descent into nihilism, Scheffler thinks, couldn’t be explained merely as a response to the premature and violent death of our loved ones (in the ...”

“... atomic matter they are made of will simply dissolve. After death, there is nothing – no pain, no joy, no family, no fear, no mind, no perception. ‘So when you see a man resent his fate,’ he says, ‘he’s pitying himself.’ He is no more sanguine about the rest of the universe. We can see the earth growing old, decaying and, finally, perishing like the ...”

“... Macaulay possible, vindicated Shelley against Arnold, and preached a religion of poetry: ‘It is joy, joy in our inmost hearts. It is a passion like love or it is nothing.’ He fused England, poetry, joy, youth and landscape in a single sacramental experience. If this is rather like ...”