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“... edited by Michael Nedo and Michele Ranchetti, with the caption: Wittgenstein mit dem Freund Ben Richards in London. In the article I dismiss as absurd the idea that this picture proves what Steiner takes it as proving. I do so on the grounds that, having met Ben Richards, I can confidently discount the idea that he is, or ...”

“... metaphor towards the podium labelled Supreme Figure. For the father of practical criticism, I.A. Richards, the brain was ‘a connecting organ’, and metaphor – in which a ‘tenor’, or thing described, is presented via a ‘vehicle’, or a metaphorical expression of it – was the core figure for making connections between distinct entities. Metaphor ...”

“... of Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell, but the biggest influence on him was his supervisor, I.A. Richards, who advocated what he called ‘practical criticism’, or the close analysis of passages of anonymised writing. An ideal reading of an ideal literary text would involve an ‘organised response’, in which different stimuli and reactions to them would ...”

“... picture of Wittgenstein, reproduced in Monk’s book, which was taken in Swansea in 1945 by Ben Richards – a young man almost forty years Wittgenstein’s junior with whom he was then despairingly in love. Even at this distance of time, and in two-dimensional monochrome, it is hard to meet Wittgenstein’s gaze full-on for very long. The eyes engage you ...”

“... prose is flogged as ‘wilfully loose’ and as a ‘yawp for yawp’s sake’. The critic I.A. Richards is subjected to a sliding studs-up tackle: ‘If I.A. Richards really finds the communication of simple experiences so much more difficult than most people do, this is probably because he avoids defining the terms he ...”

“... Coe could actually create a larger cast-list, but in The Rotters’ Club, the characters include a Colin, a Sheila, a Benjamin, a Paul and a Lois Trotter, a Bill; an Irene and Doug Anderton; Barbara, Sam and Philip Chase, Malcolm, Roy Slater, Sean Harding, Steve Richards, Culpepper, Cicely Boyd, Donald, Claire and Miriam ...”

“... this way is, of course, to invoke the ‘close reading’ criteria implicit in the early work of Richards and Leavis, and these may seem inappropriate to a poetry that employs a different rhetorical strategy. But it is worth recalling that those criteria can be seen as, in part, a reaction against the inflation and abuse of public language in the First World ...”

“... in his luggage. Empson received his marching orders, and the best that his mentor I.A. Richards, also a fellow of Magdalene, could do was to fix him up with a hastily-arranged professorship in Tokyo. The point of this (surely apocryphal?) story is not to present Empson as a worthy forerunner of our current morality, even though the ...”

“... bowling at the age of 13 – while at Durban High School the opening pair of Lee Irvine and Barry Richards had century or double-century partnerships every week; it was impossible to bowl to them. When in 1969-70 this lot, plus the young Pollock brothers, Peter and Graeme, slaughtered the Australians by four tests to nil, you felt that it had been waiting to ...”

“... dialogue, and then went home to read Being and Nothingness (or perhaps just its popularisation in Colin Wilson’s The Outsider). And maybe, later on, it was Marlowe and Spade who gave us the courage and foolheadedness to take to the streets. We were young and had energy to expend, so movies and books weren’t quite enough. We couldn’t all be private ...”

“... about he developed through the succeeding volumes a style marked by dazzling feats of compression. Colin MacInnes’s essay of 1960 on Pevsner’s English is also reprinted in A Celebration. It compares him, not very illuminatingly, with Conrad but does little to characterise him as a writer.At the Architectural Review in the 1930s, James ...”

“... great theoretical summa’, is the view also of his contributors William Righter, Alan Durant and Colin MacCabe, and Jean Lecercle, whose lively piece includes a remark to the effect that the poem ‘Camping Out’ mentions a girlfriend cleaning her teeth into the lake. Empson, so keen on biography, would have liked him to know that this was no girlfriend but ...”