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“... the sickliness of this has been recognised and condemned. It was one of the Leavisites – Denys Thompson, I believe – who put the boot in on the Essays of Elia; and this was one of the Leavisite demolition-jobs that truly cleared a space, and let the air in, for a more than academic public. John Gross, though he dutifully and unavoidably finds ...”

“... and consumed. The lecture was printed in the teachers’ journal Use of English, whose editor was Denys Thompson, a grammar school headmaster and former Scrutiny co-editor. Thompson was the person who did most to extend F.R. Leavis’s brand of literary criticism into the terrain of mass culture and to embed ...”

“... and the early graduates of Cambridge English, [D.W.] Harding, [L.C.] Knights, Q.D. Leavis and [Denys] Thompson – five authors who, in aggregate, wrote on virtually every topic that Scrutiny ever discussed. The second Scrutiny generation, led by [R.G.] Cox and Ford, was markedly more restricted in range.’ Ford and his ...”

“... part of the saving remnant on which the future of reading would depend. The photo on the cover of Denys Thompson’s The Leavises shows him in a jacket impermeable to the insults of time and with the open shirt of a Labour leader. He looks indeed, as his wife wrote of both of them, ‘grey-haired and worn down with battling for survival in a hostile ...”

“... and, as recently as 1964, there was a Pelican volume edited by his former collaborator, Denys Thompson, called Discrimination and Popular Culture. Nowadays that would probably be consigned to the Race Relations shelf: ‘discrimination’ as a positive term is hardly available any longer. Among the other keywords of Leavis’s ...”

“... and undergraduate tantrums. ‘Apparently while I was singing “Love is a sickness” yesterday Denys [Becher] gave an appalling display of temperament because he couldn’t find his tights.’ The Magpies went over very well in Aston Bampton, where the local children did some songs and dances in the interval and were ‘most spontaneous and ...”

“... was exercised via the students who became teachers, mostly in grammar schools. Leavisites like Denys Thompson and Raymond O’Malley produced English textbooks for them to use and edited the journal Use of English, which provided model lessons and exercises. It also promoted practical criticism teaching in schools, in the Leavis manner, via pairings ...”

“... evidence of stupidity on hand – and none more eye-catching than that left behind him by ‘Thompson of Sunderland’, a vandal out of the North who had scrawled his name and address on Pompey’s column in Alexandria in letters that Flaubert claims could be read ‘a quarter of a league away’. More significantly stupid than ...”