“... for his heroines and compares Dickens unfavourably to the subject of her previous biography, Thomas Hardy. But Dickens didn’t think he was being untruthful: his model was Mary, though he didn’t realise he was copying a copy, one he had fashioned himself. When he writes to Forster of ‘that spirit which directs my life, and … has pointed ...”

“... sexual radical James Hinton. While involved in this doll’s house in reverse, Ellis attended St Thomas’s Hospital to complete a medical training. He had an unsatisfactory, rather destructive, semi-relationship with Olive Schreiner, with both parties withdrawing as weaknesses were rèvealed. Life was further complicated by the presence of Hinton, whose ...”

“... with 100 photographs he had taken at the poem’s various locales), or his friendship with Thomas Hardy, who attended the burial of his ashes in Dorchester and wrote a poem in his memory. Treves’s devotion – and Madge Kendal’s – to a victim of Hardy’s capricious gods is best regarded as an illustration ...”

“... gyres. It likes Wendy Cope and Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell and Thomas Hardy and the lullabies of Housman. It prefers poets whose speakers say how they feel, and feel what they say, while never running out of rhythm and never speaking in tongues. It likes Philip Larkin, the unlikely patron saint of self-help, though ...”

“... locked the files away from me, so my most recent take on male duplicity came from the novels of Thomas Hardy. The 1960s were behind us, the era of free love, but it had not dawned in Wilmslow, from where we commuted on weekdays on the crowded 7.45. I guessed why Nicolette had moved across the square. It was more discreet for a senior partner to be ...”

“... Knox could seize on her work as worthy of parody – not just recognisable, but recognised. When Thomas Hardy, John Masefield and Walter de la Mare secured her a civil list pension in 1923, Mew couldn’t decide whether it was more ‘like a dream or a nightmare’. Such diffidence also contained defiance. Her public readings were bracing affairs ...”

“... their forenames – H.E. Bates, W.H. Davies, L.P. Hartley. Yet early reviews compared Coppard to Hardy, Kipling and D.H. Lawrence, and he was acclaimed by (among others) Ford Madox Ford, Malcolm Cowley and, later, Doris Lessing. Though his most productive decade was the 1920s, and he was well enough known by 1931 for a bibliography of his work to be ...”

“... That marvellous line from Thomas Hardy’s ‘At the Railway Station’: ‘And the man in the handcuffs suddenly sang/With grimful glee …’ Frank Auerbach to William Feaver And the man in the handcuffs suddenly sang With grimful glee: ‘This life so free Is the thing for me!’ And the constable smiled, and said no word ...”

“... curiously, only 21 are included here) have been compared by Robert Nye to the poems written by Thomas Hardy after the death of his wife, and by Jonathan Raban to In Memoriam. The subject is a precarious one for poetry, and Dunn has not always succeeded in avoiding the pitfalls. Poems like ‘Dining’ and ‘Arrangements’ are dangerously ...”

“... a literary critic, a sombre, self-consciously intellectual figure, a friend of Ford Madox Ford and Thomas Hardy. In 1912, he had published an essay in which he expressed satisfaction that, in the new age of specialisation, future wars were likely to be fought exclusively by professional warriors, the people most appropriately equipped to face horrors few ...”

“... than anyone in the book. Not enough, I know.’ Bishop compared Lowell’s violation to something Thomas Hardy had described in a letter, some ‘abuse’ in which ‘details of a lately deceased man’s life’ were published ‘under the guise of a novel’. She acknowledged that ‘Lizzie is not dead etc’ but worried about the ‘infinite ...”

“... up onto the rougher, more English ground of Povington Hill. The heath still resembles the one Thomas Hardy imagined as Lear’s, but it is now part of the Royal Armoured Corps’s gunnery range: enclosed and blasted in a new sense. The road goes up past the turf-covered rings of Flower’s Barrow, and then turns off towards Worbarrow Bay. Along with ...”

“... his ‘philosophy’, putting into order the chaotic insights of The Rainbow and the ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’. There is a tendency among literary critics to use Lawrence’s art as a stick with which to beat his ‘philosophy’ – for which his own maxim ‘Do not trust the teller, trust the tale’ comes in as handy support. What this ignores is ...”

“... in Britain is the boom in cheap, paperback ‘classic’ fiction. Jane Austen, the Brontës, Thomas Hardy and Dickens sell (in World’s Classics and Penguin Classics editions alone) up to fifty thousand copies a year of their most popular works in volumes costing £5 or less (more in the upmarket Everyman line). Cumulative sales are incalculably ...”

“... on his condition. Every book he reviews turns out to be somehow pertinent to his lava-lump: Thomas Hardy suffered from unexplained pelvic pains too, as did Benito Mussolini. Writing an introduction to Vitaliano Brancati’s Il bell’Antonio, a novel about a gorgeous young man whose impotence has something to do with Italy’s descent into ...”