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“... In parts of our literary culture the idea of the self is derided as a bourgeois fabrication, ripe for deconstruction. But most readers remain very attached to selves, their own and other people’s, and like reading about them in biographies and autobiographies. Such books are evidently popular with publishers, and accounts of them regularly fill the review columns of the Sunday papers ...”

“... and brilliance – with all their doubts and hesitations – could safely be left to the authors. Bernard Bergonzi’s early career has some resemblances to Arber’s. Bergonzi left school before the age of 16 to work as a junior clerk in an obscure London publishing firm. He credits his recruitment as a ...”

“... twice – in the danger to his marriage to Julia, the anti-Catholic he had married in New Zealand. Bernard Bergonzi’s description of Thomas Arnold the Younger as a ‘Victorian Wanderer’ is borrowed from Arnold’s own autobiography, Passages in a Wandering Life, but there is far more feverish guilt and self-contradiction in his life than the term ...”

“... written by professors of English literature in Midland universities has received an accession. Bernard Bergonzi’s The Roman Persuasion is attended by so many coincidental links to David Lodge’s recent How far can you go? that to remark on them is almost unavoidable. By ‘links’ I don’t mean influence, for they are books of very different ...”

“... to look at these questions as they come up in the other arts is only very scantily honoured. Bergonzi’s book is, as one has come to expect of his work, temperate, judicious and open-minded. It is a collection of reviews with an introduction in which he makes some sensible remarks about the Modernist problem, noting that the emergence of Modernism as a ...”

“... essayist that Wells (or part of him) was to become after 1900, it was an explosive mixture. Bernard Bergonzi once explained what happened to Wells at the turn of the century by saying that his acceptance of a collectivist ideology destroyed the autonomy of his imagination. In other words, Wells would have been a better artist if he had not meddled ...”

“... of English will become departments of cultural studies (this is something like the point Bernard Bergonzi made in his Exploding English) and the old style of literary study will survive, if at all, on the level of the modern Classics department. Even there it won’t be possible to develop in students ‘an authentic passion for ...”

“... in the view that Eagleton is still a Cambridge man: in his essay ‘The Terry Eagleton Story’, Bernard Bergonzi pointed to the end of Literary Theory: An Introduction, with its expressed preference for ‘specific, living and practical democracy’ over the abstractions of the ballot box (‘specific’ and ‘living’, those Leavisite ...”

“... of different theories’. Colin MacCabe refers to ‘the cultural supremacism of Leavis’. Bernard Bergonzi traces the development of Leavis’s attitude to Eliot’s poetry and criticism, and shows how Leavis used Blake and Lawrence as sticks with which to beat Eliot. ‘What Leavis does to Eliot in The Living Principle looks like a mode of ...”

“... For example, he recalls first encountering Frank Kermode in 1961: At the Cambridge conference he [Bernard Bergonzi] introduced me to Frank Kermode and as a result I found myself sitting with a group late one evening in somebody’s room, sipping whisky out of teacups and bathroom mugs, listening to Frank discoursing in his relaxed, drily amusing ...”

“... remembered her constant criticism of MacDiarmid and found her ‘somewhat dictatorial’. Bernard Bergonzi, who became an English professor, thought her ‘the most malicious woman’ he had ever met. Muir was awarded a CBE and appointed Charles Eliot Norton visiting professor at Harvard in 1955, before retiring with Willa to Swaffham Prior in ...”

“... manner, a manner as blunt and accessible as in Herbert’s poetry or Aubrey’s prose. As Bernard Bergonzi shows in an acute and learned essay, Davie has had a long love-hate relationship with Ezra Pound, the poet par excellence of International Modernism. Davie once agreed with Leavis that Pound had ‘no real understanding of culture or ...”

“... of a cover of respectability. A version of the idea of dividing the territory has been offered in Bernard Bergonzi’s recent book, Exploding English. His arrangement would give the opposition all literature except poetry and Elizabethan and Jacobean poetic drama. This scenario is a compromise without any visible rationale other than the time-honoured ...”

“... the magazine. It was taken up in a TLS editorial; there was also a big Guardian piece about it, by Bernard Bergonzi. I’ve lots of cuttings; at that time I used to keep cuttings. In the next issue there was a long essay by Colin, ‘Dreams and Responsibilities’, about Al’s New Poetry anthology which was as near to a manifesto as the magazine ever ...”