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“... never misses an opportunity for attack,’ John Gawsworth, an admiring contemporary, observed. William Rothenstein thought him ‘armed and armoured, like a tank, ready to cross any country, however rough and hostile’. He certainly had a genius for pugnacity, no doubt partly encouraged by the example Hulme set: ‘a very rude and truculent man’ in ...”

“... cream and dappled unicorns had fled.’ Of course the dappled unicorns are ironic; but then, as William Empson observed, irony only has a point if it is true in some degree in both the senses on offer: here, poor old Tony’s Gothic world is both an object of disenchanted modern mockery and at the same time a system of defunct values that is regarded ...”

“... spasms of virtuous indignation about the wickedness of a small number of idealists of years ago. William Empson was stirred to an opposite kind of ire by one of many hack works, The Traitors by Alan Moorehead, who ‘specifically denounced them for having had the impudence to obey their own consciences’, instead of understanding that a citizen’s ...”

“... Keach and other scholars have noted, ‘the intellectual philosophy’ most clearly given in Sir William Drummond’s Academical Questions. Keach quotes the passage in which Shelley’s position, at least for the moment, is clear: ‘Nothing exists but as it is perceived. The difference is merely nominal between those two classes of thought which are ...”

“... sense, though, Edinburgh did adopt him. His talents took him to the Royal High School, where William Drummond, Henry Mackenzie and Walter Scott had been before him. There Karl became favourite pupil and close friend of Hector MacIver, that incomparable teacher of literature, who recognised his gifts and took him with his other clever boys down the Calton ...”

“... was not the only contemporary to wonder in retrospect at the Auden effect – what the painter William Coldstream called ‘a real magic and glamour in his presence’ – and shrewdly put his finger on part of it: the figure Auden cut was at once impressive and comical, as though acting out some great running joke about authority or seriousness. He strode ...”

“... In a chapter on animals in his Description of England, the Elizabethan antiquary William Harrison told not one but two stories about Henry VII. ‘As the report goeth’, he wrote, the king had had all the mastiffs in England put to death because ‘they durst presume to fight against the lion, who is their king and sovereigne ...”

“... finely tuned to the sound of the modern as Wilson was in his two great decades. Neither Leavis nor Empson was conspicuously successful in discovering young talent: during World War Two Empson was for a time passionately enthusiastic about the mild romantic verse of Sidney Keyes. In America, Wilson seems in later years to ...”

“... and Classification Department. It was hardly a heroic war.’ But he did write heroically. William Pritchard, in his biography of Jarrell, says that ‘in letter after letter, Jarrell turned the routine, the boredom, the loneliness and the wastefulness of army life far from the zones of combat into the figures of something like art.’ In February ...”

“... man of letters – poetry editor of the Observer, a contributor to the New Yorker under William Shawn, a TV and radio critic and commentator, a good old-fashioned littérateur. Reflecting on his years spent writing about contemporary poetry, ‘always the shabbiest and most malicious fringe of the literary world’, he admits that during those ten ...”

“... of 1940s poetry. Younger writers, taking their tone from Orwell as well as from Leavis and Empson, were adopting tougher attitudes and plainer idioms. ‘The Movement,’ Scott wrote, launching the capitalised noun on its successful career, ‘as well as being anti-phoney, is anti-wet; sceptical, robust, ironic, prepared to be as comfortable as ...”

“... steady iron-hard jet of absolutely total nonsense as if under great pressure from a hose’, as William Empson put it. Coming on the attack here, though, you need to get beyond the blank stare and the affectless inventory that ‘speaks for itself’, that declares: ‘and this is literally all there is to it.’ (‘We are presented with a piece of ...”

“... of relations or connection. For the sake of convenience, and following the tutelary spirit of William Empson, I’ve grouped the meanings of knowledge in The Wings of the Dove in seven sets. One. In this novel, you can know that something is the case. This is the most frequent meaning of the words know and knowledge. You could know, for ...”

“... Poems’ appearing the following year in his memoir, A.E.H.). Reviewing More Poems in 1937, Empson suggested Housman had rejected some of them ‘for making the stock situation of his poems too obviously a personal one’, meaning those which concerned Moses Jackson. Archie Burnett’s Oxford edition of 1997 shows how closely Housman brooded over ...”

“... of the two in the writer’s work gives some sense of his giant reticent power of mind. To quote William Empson, on another subject: ‘The contradictions cover such a range’ – yet they are always reciprocal, in communication with each other. The meaning of Hamlet must be intrinsic with what in it holds audiences and readers. And, even if King Lear ...”