“... and discharge this responsibility, Gelpi takes the task extremely seriously: Day Lewis’s poetry may have ‘fallen from notice or discussion’, but Gelpi is confident that his reassessment of his work, ‘will confirm his place as one of the major British poets of this century’. From the outset, readers of the book are left in little doubt that they are ...”

“... just not true! Ovid all bollocks. Would have been in love with me, had I lived in ancient Greece. May in fact have been referring to me in Wretched Tatty Papyrus Fragment No. 211 (Lobel-Page): Come [Terry?] … cast off your [air-cushioned?] Nikes the [?] nightingale [?] … Sappho of Lesbos has always seemed more phantasm than historical personage, of ...”

“... in his view of literary history: he held no overt thesis on the precise causes of that decline. He may have regretted that an independent peasantry (also Wordsworth’s desideratum) did not grow strong enough to survive the Industrial Revolution. But he relied less on social history than on his sense for the growth of an anti-word. The decline happened ...”

“... uses and its presence is so much taken for granted as to be relatively benign. Though bad art may embody poshlost, its pretensions are usually harmless and recognisable: worse things happen when good art is taken up by poshlost, and has the kind of qualities which it can take over. When does this happen? Not with Mozart, with Shakespeare or with ...”

“... recalls H.L. Mencken’s definition of Puritanism as ‘the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.’ He attacked Caroline Teddy Boys in his first tract against long hair; the second work was a sustained whine against drinking. He wrote the longest, if not the most weighty, attack on stage plays, defended the Sabbath and attacked ...”

“... in The Beauties and Furies. When they do not, something is up. These rancid, cancerous homes may provide a useful apprenticeship in the nature of tyranny (several times in The Man Who Loved Children Stead stresses that children have ‘no rights’ within the family): that is all. The only escape is a plunge into an exponential whirl of furnished ...”

“... kind of noise – the sound of scholars breaking lances. Some of the likely murmurs of complaint may prove a bit churlish. Of course we should have preferred a novel, and a polished performance rather than one written as a family entertainment, and an original Austen work rather than one initiated by Richardson. Yet, if it had to be an adaptation, no work by ...”

“... became in his flattery, the more Berenson resolved to hold his meaty embrace at bay. ‘He may turn out too animal, too overwhelmingly masculine, too Bohemian,’ he fretted: ‘he may expect me to drink and guzzle with him.’ Even at his most decorous and ingratiating, Hemingway gave off too much of the whiff of ...”

“... Star’ of their poetry, though Fenton’s minor masterpiece ‘A Vacant Possession’ may, and conceivably should, be what they strive to match. Reflexive, aleatory and cornucopian, the New Narrative deploys its fragmented and ramifying fictions to image the unpredictability of life, and its continuous shadowing by What Might Be. It seems, in ...”

“... my part I believe that a man serves himself better by showing a respect for such moral taste as he may possess ... While a great deal is made of aesthetic sensibility and its refinements, we hear very little about moral sensibility. It is ignored; and the deep-seated spiritual vulgarity that lies at the heart of our civilisation commonly passes without notice ...”

“... and wears the same subdued colours, and continues in the same vein for 30 lines. Only a little may divide a poem of this type from Fleur Adcock’s ‘The Soho Hospital for Women’, or ‘Old Man Travelling’, but ‘the little more and how much it is.’ The great danger to poetry today is that these sort of flat sensitive apprehensions ...”

“... to believe that at least some rational processes are not local in either of these respects. It may be that wherever either semantic or global features of mental processes begin to make their presence felt, you reach the limits of what Turing’s kind of computational rationality is able to explain. As things stand, what’s beyond these limits is not a ...”

“... over a hundred short stories, most of them in SF magazines. By dying in March, Dick missed the May premiere of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, the first movie made from his work. Twenty-six years on, eight more films have come out of Dick’s fiction, among them the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle Total Recall (1990) and Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report ...”

“... make a space for language; a painting’s semantics of juxtaposition and interval, the poet says, may trigger a kind of syntax no one has tried before; the all-at-onceness of the image is an incitement to prosody. Why then, conversely, are not paintings drawn from Paradise Lost or Marino Faliero driven by a similar effort at mimicry, or intimation at ...”

“... always another step worth taking away from the well-turned ornament. ‘Memory’ is undated. It may have been written before the ‘Last Poems’ of 1872, sometimes known as ‘New Poems’ or ‘Songs’, but this is where it has come to rest in the running order. It is a difficult, unaccommodating poem, despite the impartial courtesies of the 12-syllable ...”