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“... and ‘Evidence in the Eliot Case’ (1996) – this last featuring a notably unkind commentary on Christopher Ricks’s editing of Eliot’s Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-17. In the new book, as in these essays, Raine assumes that his readers are likely to be ‘somewhat impure and apt to confuse issues’. It is my impression that he remained ...”

“... had their high-culture connections, if only through such lofty sponsors as Wilfred Mellers and Christopher Ricks. And other reasons will doubtless be adduced as to why they are all relevant to the theme of this book. Still, as the Introduction remarks, ‘many things had to go if this book were not to be an impenetrable thicket of names and ...”

“... That is not to say that this study escapes entirely the charge levelled at Shelley’s poetry by Christopher Ricks some years ago, of elephantiasis, and the authors are aware of the possibility. Indeed, the whole subject is not without humour. Voltaire and Boswell, to name but two observers, saw syphilis as God’s practical joke on his creation. The ...”

“... scholars – C.K. Stead, Ronald Bush, Julius himself – believe that the review was by Eliot. Christopher Ricks doesn’t disagree with this judgment – whether or not Eliot wrote the review, he observes in T.S. Eliot and Prejudice, it has ‘the stamp of his approval and the stamp of his tone’. Calling the anonymous notice ‘shameful’, ...”

“... layer of Haffenden’s elucidations. Of course, the notes can’t always help much. Empson told Christopher Ricks in an interview that his poem ‘The Teasers’ developed in such a way that he began to dislike it; he ‘cut it down to rags so that it doesn’t make sense. You can’t find out what it is about ... But it’s a beautiful metrical ...”

“... him. The critics and reviewers now making their reputations ‘were men like Frank Kermode and Christopher Ricks, who were academics primarily’ – and who as a class, we may add, would in an earlier generation have been confining themselves to the conservative tasks of textual scholarship within environments remote from even the fringes of literary ...”

“... or the demonstrative. Here David Trotter comes into his own, having learned (I would guess from Christopher Ricks) how such apparently neutral and instrumental parts of speech – including prepositions, ‘in’ and ‘into’, ‘with’ and ‘amid’ and ‘among’ – exert, when used by an accomplished writer, far more powerful suasive force ...”

“... prose again’. And this is also why Bentley’s Milton was the graveyard of his method. As both Christopher Ricks and William Empson recognised, Bentley had a remarkable ability to spot the poetically dazzling in Milton. The trouble was he would then emend it away. When Milton’s devils smelt gold from ore, Milton says they ‘scumm’d the bullion ...”

“... with the hope of forcing his reader to admire the justice of those similes and metaphors. Christopher Ricks need look no further (certainly not across the Irish Sea) for textual substantiation of his theory of the self-reflexive image.Here, as before, the best of Raine’s poems present something more than a concatenation of metaphors, effective ...”

“... are being brought to bear on Dylan by people who (like Day’s co-editor of the Tennyson MSS, Christopher Ricks) have discovered that what Dylan has to say and his exceptional way of saying it are as responsive to their critical attention as the traditional topics of Eng Lit. The panellists were worried that the ‘romantic outlaw’ tendency would ...”

“... than the evening air/Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars’), I was reminded of Christopher Ricks saying twenty years ago, in an article about the sexual revolution of the Sixties, that he was against the whole thing on the grounds that the new free-for-all was unfair to plain women. (What about plain men? Are women pleased to get any ...”

“... it makes on the listener. It is literary criticism ‘to the moment’. Like his PhD supervisor, Christopher Ricks, Griffiths is above all an apostle of close reading. He treats the passages he discusses as morally and psychologically instructive as well as semantically subtle. He attends to small details of syntax or diction, but he is also concerned ...”

“... with mere ordinary unhappiness’. His amused dejection and uproarious melancholy (Beckett, as Christopher Ricks observed, ‘had what he drily called a strong weakness for oxymoron’) are constant reminders to himself as well as others not to cede anything to the reactionary forces of facile cheer. As a master​ of minimalism, Beckett knew the ...”

“... to do with religion and a text by Eric Griffiths which Cronin, understandably, misattributes to Christopher Ricks in Beckett’s Dying Words. Griffiths’s edifying send-off was impressive even by the standards of the ghastlier forms of obituary-speak: ‘Catholics pray for the dead that they be granted refrigerii sedem, quiet-is beatitudinem, et ...”

“... of the Tudors whom Froude resurrected, and that critics as varied as Elton, Conyers Read and Christopher Ricks rate him very highly, his fate is a puzzle, and Brady’s exhaustive investigation is the first to give it the attention it deserves. Brady makes a good case for rehabilitation. We are wrong to ignore Froude, he writes, because he was ...”