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“... the wholly unselfconscious energy which fused the pair in, say, the best poetry of Tennyson and Browning now becomes so well aware of what it is up to. Had he come across it, Proust would have been enchanted by Browning’s ‘Meeting at Night’, with its astonishing report of the concentration of desire: the startled ...”

“... was appalled by Coleridge (‘a mass of richest spices, putrified into a dunghill’), and advised Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett and Alfred Tennyson to give up poetry and write prose instead. Not only his contemporaries fell short. Milton was guilty of unsystematic reasoning (‘It is quite clear that he never studied mathematics very deeply, or ...”

“... The year Strauss was born, 1864, saw the publication of Robert Browning’s Dramatis Personae. The author of Andrea del Sarto would have found in Richard Strauss a subject ideally suited to his imaginative powers. He would have cast the composer, not, I think, in his early years, but towards the end of his life: in 1940, perhaps, in late summer ...”

“... the great outdoors.’ The twins were in the studio to work on a film called Freaks, made by Tod Browning, who had just directed Dracula with Bela Lugosi. In their 1995 book Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning, David Skal and Elias Savada recount the casting process for Freaks: In a Montreal sideshow, scouts ...”

“... 1895 were busy for Oscar Wilde. In late January he was in Algiers with Alfred Douglas. He wrote to Robert Ross: ‘There is a great deal of beauty here. The Kabyle boys are quite lovely. At first we had some difficulty procuring a proper civilised guide. But now it is all right and Bosie and I have taken to haschish: it is quite exquisite: three puffs of smoke ...”

“... willingly confuses the writer with the writing. Having read ‘Lady Geraldine’s Courtship’, Browning declares in his first letter to Elizabeth Barrett: ‘I do, as I say, love these books with all my heart – and I love you too.’ Those rare, and usually misbegotten, occasions when the reader and writer approach each other directly are what interest ...”

“... Robert Martin’s book is not one of those literary biographies that reshuffle a familiar narrative and perhaps add a few bits of new information or conjecture. It is a full-scale life, founded on primary sources, many of them previously unpublished. As the first major biography since Hallam Tennyson’s pious memoir of 1897, it has obvious importance ...”

“... apprehensions, so that one is left with clearer notions than ever before of the peculiar gifts of Browning, Auden or Larkin. There is no denying the disadvantages of this way of doing criticism. The reader soon finds out that in Everett’s prose there are few variations of pace, the tempo is a steady andante and never con moto. There are vague patches. A ...”

“... of Arran Leigh (the name, as well as the poetry, revealed the influence of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh). Celebrating the love of women and girls, this collection, a mixture of original compositions and translations, is full of sunlight and flowers. It is also prefaced by a sonnet in which the author addresses her 13-year-old niece in ...”

“... of Ceylon. She read the books in his excellent library and met at his table such great men as Browning, Tennyson and Henry James. Gregory was regarded as a fair landlord, and it has been conjectured that this regrettably unusual reputation was later responsible for Coole getting off so lightly in the desperate days of the Civil War. He believed in ...”

“... how in London he entered both the world of letters and the world of Society, lunched with Browning and dined with Matthew Arnold, and visited Lord This and Lady That and the Honourable Whatshisname. The Hardy that we have at the end of the volume is a prosperous, middle-aged English Man of Letters, someone who might have written the works ...”

“... enthusiasm for Ossian saw the publication of the important Homeric studies of Thomas Blackwell and Robert Wood. In the late 18th century there was a revival of serious education in the ancient universities, and the institution of the Tripos at Cambridge and the Honour Schools at Oxford had the effect of increasing substantially the numbers of those able to ...”

“... fashionable views being dilute early Eliot: Shelley no good because of his adolescent enthusiasms; Browning no good because he liked dining out and sought confused multi-tudinousness; a general preference for the dry little droppings of T. E. Hulme. But, unremarkable as they are, these views are held with a certain passion; a great deal of personal ...”

“... That gave you vantage when you would despise: My bankrupt heart has no more tears to spend. Robert Bridges, who, as Martin says, ‘understood perfectly well both Dolben’s role and Hopkins’s emotions in writing’ these sonnets, noted on the autograph copy that they ‘must never be printed’. Had he become a fellow of Balliol and a Classics ...”