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“... Jacob Bronowski and Humphrey Jennings, and those seniors best qualified to judge – I.A. Richards especially – admired him greatly. The quality of his writing as an undergraduate is not surprising only because we have been brought up to believe, with approximate accuracy, that Seven Types of Ambiguity began as essays written for ...”

“... suicide – Sexton was encouraged to study and write by her young psychiatrist. Watching I.A. Richards lecturing on the sonnet on Boston educational television, Sexton decided that she could write one, and went on to write them every day for a month. Other experiments with verse forms, all praised by her doctor, followed. By Christmas 1956, at the pivotal ...”

“... a couple of brawls and a series of obituary notices. One by one the giants have departed: Leavis, Richards, Empson, and now Raymond Williams. The first three had come through to ripe and embattled old age, but Williams was still in his prime as a writer and critic. When I visited him in Saffron Walden in late December, he had been laid up for several months ...”

“... of inscription. Who in their right mind would argue against simplicity, efficiency and speed?I.A. Richards, who taught in China in the 1920s and 1930s, met enthusiasts for Romanisation from a Kuomintang-supported movement called Gwoyeu Romatzyh. They wanted to eliminate hanzi and adopt the Roman alphabet for writing Mandarin and other Chinese languages. But ...”

“... Merton, Parsons, Radcliffe-Brown and more. In his preface he thanks Adorno, Henry Nash Smith, I.A. Richards, Talcott Parsons and Peter Laslett, among others. The standard caricature of the Cambridge-influenced criticism of the postwar years represents it as blunderingly empirical and cosily parochial: these stereotypes wilt and shrivel when confronted by ...”

“... his personal life.† He hated the fact that he had made his wife unhappy, ‘due to my being what I am’. He is referring to passionate friendships with men – with the novelist Reynolds Price and with Bryan Obst, a zoologist who died of Aids in 1991, and was buried to the sound of birdsong. Stephen’s putative conversion to heterosexuality is treated here ...”

“... Translators are, themselves, emerging as fully-licensed members of the literary community. I.A. Richards’s finding, in 1953, that the transfer of a Chinese philosophic-poetic concept into English ‘may very probably be the most complex type of event yet produced in the evolution of the cosmos’ would now strike one as hyperbolic but plausible. St Jerome ...”

“... was a duty, not a virtue. ‘When,’ he asked fretfully, ‘will mankind begin to understand that I am more careful than they are, not less?’ He declined all academic and national honours because to accept them would be to admit comparability with other classical scholars who had received them, admiring the attitude of the 17th-century Greek scholar Thomas ...”

“... and indeed self-consciously plays with this analogy in a nice passage, owing everything to I.A. Richards, on the amplifying power of metaphor. But his sensitivity stops far short of that point, so obvious to someone in tedious old Europe, at which it becomes clear that the state in which the only remaining problems of power are psychological is a state ...”

“... there was also the bright American world of the New Criticism, John Crowe Ransom, I.A. Richards, Allen Tate, and young up-and-coming members like Randall Jarrell, a world in which the academic and the poet were entering together a new world of feeling and technique, joining tradition and novelty. Bliss was it in that dawn when American campuses ...”

“... lay open for Saussure early on was blighted by the remarks made about him by C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards in The Meaning of Meaning, where he is dead and buried by page six, charged with having ‘concocted’ the chief object of his inquiry, la langue, and of being at one with A.N. Whitehead in naively falling for the ‘Method of Intensive ...”

“... in disgrace in 1929. There are three essays on Empson in this book, and he and his teacher I.A. Richards are in one sense its heroes, variable and (in Empson’s case) not always admirable advocates of what matters in literary study. Richards agreed with Eliot that maintaining ‘a high degree of culture’ was hard work ...”

“... most importantly, a paper on Practical Criticism. This exercise stemmed originally from I.A. Richards’s book of the same name, though it developed what MacKillop often calls the ‘anthropo-critical’ approach, and consisted of exercises in critical analysis and the dating of anonymous passages, the kind of thing Leavis himself performed with ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... unity is a discredited notion. It is striking how original a move this is. From Aristotle to I.A. Richards, the work of art is expected to form a coherent whole. It is not until the rise of Futurism, Constructivism, Surrealism and so on that this arbitrary diktat is really challenged. From the Dadaists to Brecht, there is an urge to dismantle rather than ...”