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“... 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 ...”

“... right, though it is not very likely. This is, for all its undoubted erotic force, an odd poem; as Barbara Everett once pointed out, it might be thought a record of failure, since the only participant who is undressed at the end of the poem is the man (‘To teach thee I am naked first’). What Empsom seems to have left out of consideration is that there ...”

“... only every second time. I can think of several writers for whom this rule should be relaxed. Barbara Everett, for example, is proof that the traditional academic study of English literature, armed against theory and sensitive to real life, is the only sort of attention adequate to the subject. Her presence in the anthology would be a powerful ...”

“... a figure of primarily biographical interest (‘the “life” without the “literature”’, as Barbara Everett put it), there was a weary familiarity to discussions of the relation between his work and his biography. Without capitulating to the sensationalism of the romance plot, Crawford demonstrates that the letters refresh our sense of Eliot ...”

“... this innovation in the ten rigidly parallel monologues of The Ring and the Book, a structure that Barbara Everett (in a brilliant essay published in the LRB 25 years ago) likened unanswerably to ‘other and baser Victorian misunderstandings about the nature of the aesthetic, from wax flowers under glass to models of the Crystal Palace constructed out of ...”

“... through Kenner’s denunciation it can be difficult sometimes to tell who the joke is on; and, as Barbara Everett remarked in her marvellous review of his book in the LRB of 10 November 1988, ‘if philistines created the longest and strongest and richest literary tradition in existence, there must be something interesting and complicated about some ...”

“... such pearls of wisdom aren’t about to stop anyone yearning for other things besides knowledge. Barbara Everett wrote in the LRB (5 February 1981) of the way Smith’s ‘flawless deep needlings of God and Mother’ make the hair rise and one of the reasons for this, I think, is that the needling doesn’t quite settle the argument. Certainly, whenever ...”

“... in modern America, with talking heads ranging from Vanessa Redgrave to Stanley Wells and Barbara Everett. It’s an odd mixture, but somehow it works, both as a legible rendition of the play and as a portrait of the craft of translating Shakespeare for modern audiences.Looking for Richard took Pacino years to finish because he had to squeeze in ...”

“... Browning’s verbose and casuistical creatures are always keen to add one more thing. He was, as Barbara Everett once said in these pages, ‘the kind of human being who enters a room talking’.* His people, too, wander in to their poems, and talk and talk, and wander back outside, where they ...”

“... should regard as the received malice. Although an admirer, Brady remains a touch less devoted than Barbara Leaming in her 1986 biography, based as it was on long personal sessions with Welles. Brady never met Welles. They communicated by phone and letter, and so important and detailed – important if only because detailed – a study would have benefited from ...”