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“... dictionaries – there is no obvious market for new issues of the complete works of George Ogle, William Oldisworth or Richardson Pack (all represented in EPFTD). Until Chadwyck-Healey, it was not clear that literary criticism could afford the panoply of advanced technology. Riding on the success of EPFTD Chadwyck-Healey has followed up with English Verse ...”

“... that anti-semitism has been, among other things, Christian. ‘I could never understand how William Empson, a poet and critic I revere, could hate Christians and especially Catholics, thinking their religion nothing but a sordid cult of blood and sacrifice. Christ’s blood was the form of his own suffering, he didn’t recommend bloodletting for ...”

“... finished a screenplay, quite a good one, about the body-snatchers Burke and Hare. His friend William Empson remembered him speaking in detail about a film he wanted to make about the life of Dickens, ‘very profound and very box office’, as Empson remembered it, adding loyally: ‘If Dylan had lived a normal ...”

“... less circumspect, free to be bad-tempered – angry if you prefer – and free to be carefree. William Empson, ostensibly reviewing the Arden edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the very first issue, was mainly concerned with calculating the speed at which the fairies travelled (800-1000 mph) to stay ahead of daylight. A paper starting from ...”

“... destructive Dissertation upon the Epistles of Phalaris (1697). This attacked Swift’s patron Sir William Temple, who had unwisely claimed that a set of letters purporting to be by the Sicilian tyrant Phalaris (who lived in the sixth century BC) were among the earliest surviving Greek texts. Bentley grinds through the epistles, showing that the customs they ...”

“... role. For all Hughes’s throwaway manner and air of untroubled expertise (he sometimes reads like William Empson trying his hand at a tale of adventure), there is, as with Kipling, a kind of innocence which is part of the charm. When Amabel Williams-Ellis, who read the first draft of A High Wind for him, sensibly objected that there could not but have ...”

“... New Signatures (February 1932), which included contributions from Julian Bell, Richard Eberhart, William Empson, Cecil Day Lewis, Stephen Spender, William Plomer and Lehmann himself. Through Spender he met Christopher Isherwood. The friendship with Spender from the very first seemed edgy, uncertain and uneasy, but ...”

“... department. Wain made friends elsewhere in the university, among them the celebrated typographer William McCance. It was McCance who hand-printed those pretty little volumes of verse, including Wain’s own first collection, Mixed Feelings, and Amis’s second, A Frame of Mind, now, I gather, much sought after. Wain was a friend, a sincere admirer and ...”

“... Reverence for Nature’s works, although an admirable quality, is ultimately unenlightening. As William Empson wrote on the subject of aesthetics, ‘critics are of two sorts: those who merely relieve themselves against the flower of beauty, and those, less continent, who afterwards scratch it up. I myself, I must confess, aspire to the second of these ...”

“... embracing ‘as many meanings as possible, that is, the most difficult meaning’. The young William Empson, who had been reading Graves for some while, adapted this insight for Seven Types of Ambiguity, which became one of the founding books of modern literary criticism; Riding later took him to task for stealing the idea. Close reading later got ...”

“... as well as admirers, dividing opinion over the next two hundred years with comical extremity. William Hazlitt, although notionally on the same side in the big political questions of the day, was pugnaciously uncharmed by the cast of mind that he discerned in Shelley’s dashing about, and anticipated a whole school of criticism: ‘There is no caput ...”

“... are pictured with their white, establishment collaborators T.S. Eliot, George Orwell and William Empson. It’s no wonder that Portland Place seemed the world’s omphalos. Sandhu also describes less bookish figures. There is his sketch, for instance, of the odd career of Michael de Freitas, aka Michael X, one of the great London rogues of the ...”

“... actually, in the days of scrolls and tablets: what is the Bible if not a self-help manual? William Caxton got in on the act early enough with The Game and Play of Chess Moralised (1474), a book which aimed to make people better than they used to be, not by bringing their souls nearer to God, but by bringing their pawns closer to the king, which many ...”

“... by lightning.) In the event, he went off instead to teach in China, as his most celebrated pupil William Empson was also to do, dropping in on Russia, where he met Eisenstein, and later on Japan and Korea. It is hard to imagine his piously parochial Cambridge colleague F.R. Leavis accompanying him on the Trans-Siberian railway. He also taught for a ...”

“... as someone who, though odd, could ‘write wonderfully about the external, everyday world’; and William Carlos Williams, busy writing Paterson, is admired for his practice of going to the park on Sundays where he ‘watched what people did and made it part of the poem’. It is the great pleasure of encountering ancient Chinese poetry in Arthur Waley’s ...”