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“... Two months after Tennyson’s death Burne-Jones was reluctantly following the instructions of the poet’s widow and son in repainting the portrait of Tennyson as a young man which now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. Emily Tennyson had never liked the picture, perhaps in part because she also disliked Edward FitzGerald, who had originally commissioned it from Samuel Laurence ...”

“... Writing in 1842 to his friend Alfred Domett, who had emigrated to New Zealand, Robert Browning enclosed ‘Tennyson’s new vol. and, alas, the old with it – that is what he calls old’. Browning was referring to the two-volume Poems of 1842, whose first volume consisted of heavily revised versions of poems published in 1830 and 1832 ...”

“... When Auden announced in his preface to a new selection that Tennyson was ‘undoubtedly the stupidest’ of all the English poets he must have known that he was asking for trouble. Trouble duly came in the shape of Sir Desmond MacCarthy, who doggedly stood up in the Sunday Times for the quality of Tennyson’s mind, deplored Auden’s account of the great man as ‘very patronising’, then sought to out-patronise him in turn: ‘It reads as if Mr Auden had been feeling while he wrote it like a middle-aged schoolmaster preparing a report on little Alfred’s work and behaviour ...”

“... page of this book tells us that it is ‘published to commemorate the centenary of Sir Charles Tennyson, the poet’s grandson and biographer, born 8 November 1879, died 22 June 1977’. Charles Tennyson was very far from being the most eccentric of all the Tennysons, but he is the most astonishing of them at least in ...”

“... for telling me’ is very much better as Carroll wrote it, without the ‘very’. A poet called Lord AlfredTennyson, not to be confused with Alfred Lord Douglas, briefly surfaces like the Kraken; the poem is here a Mort and there a Morte. Max Beerbohm’s parody of Henry ...”

“... but these days his sentences sound forth as hoary pronouncements, less like Dickens and more like Alfred LordTennyson: speculative, morbid and poetic. Significantly, and most shockingly, there is no trace of bathos, that most common and undignified of modern effects, running beneath and below his lines. Indeed, in all ...”

“... three of Stevenson (one down, two to come); and – with the present centennial haul – three of Tennyson. Given the huge expenditure of scholarly energy modern biography demands it would be rational to redistribute some of it. One would like more studies such as Claire Tomalin’s of Ellen Ternan, or Rosemary Ashton’s of G.H. Lewes, which illumine by ...”

“... According to Rebecca West, F. Tennyson Jesse was ‘ideally beautiful. I have never seen a lovelier girl.’ A sketch in Joanna Colenbrander’s biography shows a flat, winsome face with wide, rather fishy eyes; her thin limbs are splayed out with flapperish elegance. It may be that her attractions – a fat bundle of love-letters was destroyed when she died, and Mrs Colenbrander finds several witnesses to testify to her ‘aura’ – had less to do with ideal beauty than with loquaciousness and flair ...”

“... talent for a dreamy sort of introspection: ‘You all sit and talk about each other’s souls,’ Lord Charles Beresford said. Their children, buoyant on champagne and self-belief, were the first to turn against them. ‘Their minds are almshouses [for] outworn notions and wrinkled phrases,’ Raymond Asquith, Margot’s stepson, sneered. ‘We do not hunt ...”

“... from Ireland, and it seemed a good idea to knock off a little ‘Horatian Ode’ to welcome the Lord Protector home. Larkin had his own wholly characteristic way of dealing with a royal occasion. In times when nothing stood but worsened, or grew strange, there was one constant good:         she did not change. Coming first upon that in the ...”

“... to all seeking domestic work,’ she said. ‘It is only a magazine. It is not the works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. It is not a manual of magic spells.’ ‘Impertinence will not carry you far,’ the butler said. ‘Only by a short route to dismissal, and no employment tribunal for you, do not think it. Her ...”

“... Officially this was The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations. Its contents, as Tennyson explained, were ‘Brought from under every star,/Blown from over every main’, but it was much more than a display of husbandry, ‘enginery’ and ‘secrets of the sullen mine’. Subtly, and rather mysteriously, the nation was brainwashed into ...”

“... the body to render it suitable for urbanism, technological change or socialist revolution. From Alfred Tennyson to the Soviet Proletkultists, the human sensorium was to be reshaped by art. Art would help us come to terms with the fact that Darwin had apparently struck all purpose from the cosmos, or it would construct the New Man demanded by the first ...”

“... When Tennyson and Jowett sat up late together, it was to talk of murders. The Victorians took a ghoulish pleasure in every phase of their more ghastly homicides; from the moment a corpse was found the hunt for morbid thrills was intense. After seven members of the Marshall family were hacked to death at Denham in 1870, ‘pleasure vans’ brought hordes of day-trippers from London to see the gore, and to purloin souvenirs ...”

“... had the means to lead a very agreeable life, his hard reading interrupted at will by cricket at Lord’s, boating and climbing. When he married, his father increased his allowance, and did so again as each child was born, for he assumed that his son could not do his proper work in the world if he had to earn his own living. He gave Frederic the best ...”