“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to raise an excruciating shudder in the audience; and subtler minds may have perceived, as does William Empson, an ironic parody of Edward’s vice.’ Woods has no time for this idea of subtler minds. It is, he writes, clear-cut: Lightborn ‘pretends to seduce the faggot king, and then gives him what every faggot needs: a red-hot poker up the ...”

“... I feel vaguely paranoid about any poets but those of my own generation (all dead except for Empson and myself) and was delighted at how well we all got on together. ‘King of the Cats’ (to use Yeats’s phrase about himself), to whom we all paid homage, was Basil Bunting, now in his eighties, who wrote his masterpiece, Briggflatts, at the age of 65 ...”

“... among them Orwell, who put aside his loathing of British imperialism – so strong, according to William Empson, that he initially ‘felt Hitler’s war would be worthwhile if it spelt the end of the British Raj’ – to broadcast its merits to India. After attending a six-week training course dubbed ‘the Liars’ School’, he became a talks ...”

“... crimsons’ – part of the Customs compound which, 15 years later, became the classrooms where William Empson taught English during the Sino-Japanese War, encountering his own brigands outside the city walls (as described in the London Review of 5 October 1995). At Mengtze, wedlock all but crumbled. Stella fell out of love, my father into hurt ...”

“... early poems are the best things among his letters. They are founded on the New Criticism, on Empson and on Jarrell’s own highly Empsonian master’s thesis on Implication in A.E. Housman, but they display, too, a remarkable impersonal insight. Not every critic in 1945 would have said of Lowell that ‘you write more in the great tradition, the grand ...”

“... to be ‘the only man in the USA who had a thorough grounding in the techniques of Richards, Empson and Leavis at Cambridge’. Nobody tells all in job applications. Though admittedly deficient in other languages, he regarded English literature as foreign; nor did he think his talent was really literary. He obviously read widely, though with his own ...”

“... and involuntary perspective behind poems that are often irritatingly with-it, sidestepping with Empson, pirouetting with Leda and that sexist swan, helping you to imagine yourself with a great, big bill beating above that girl. It may be that today’s escape route from fashion for male poets is into deprivation, for women into over-achievement and ...”

“... a knowledge of Shakespeare and the great Metaphysicals, to which a touch of Thomas and a smack of Empson have been added for modernity’s sake. The effort to be colourful at all costs leads to such expressions as ‘the dank grass is tangled with the song / Squirmed from a blackbird by the probe of light’ (‘The Rosy-fingered’), and ‘I cannot stammer ...”

“... by vocation a philosopher, of distinctive orientation since he has close dealings with Emerson and William James as well as with Wittgenstein, and with Hollywood comedies as well as with Thoreau; and he often turns to Shakespeare for contributions to philosophical issues, confident that he explores ‘the depth of the philosophical preoccupations of his ...”

“... of England. He died in 1963.The story A.N. Wilson has to tell is more complicated than that. Empson thought Lewis ‘the best read man of his generation, one who had read everything and remembered everything he read’. He was indeed a man of words, reading, writing and arguing incessantly, when circumstances permitted. His pre-university tutor thought ...”

“... she is able to sustain our interest in their dramas, pleasures, quarrels and sorrows long after ‘William’ (as Barker always calls him – even, irritatingly, ‘our William’) has ceased to write wonderful poetry. In fact, she manages to make an intriguing sub-narrative out of his wife’s and his sister’s ...”

“... and its concentration on the improbable exploits of its American hero, Shears (played by the hunky William Holden). In both respects, Watt argued, the film embodied the characteristic defects of fantasy-entertainment down the ages, exaggerating individual agency and gratifying the desire for happy endings. Both Pamela and Lean’s film were found guilty of ...”