... a charlatan, a fool, a lunatic or a child.
R. D. Blumenfield, editor of the Daily Express on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) |
... a flabby lemon and pink giant, who hung his mouth open as though he were an animal at the zoo inviting buns - especially when the ladies were present.
Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) on Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) |
... a gap-toothed and hoary ape, who now in his dotage spits and chatters from a dirtier perch of his own finding, and fouling; coryphaeus or choragus of his Bulgarian tribe of autocoprophagaus baboons.
Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) on Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82) |
... a mercenary, hypochondriacal flibbertigibbet who doesn't take in one of the six words addressed to him.
Evelyn Waugh (1903-66) on Beverly Nichols |
... a nice, acrid, savage, pathetic old chap.
I. A. Richards (1893-1979) on Robert Frost (1874-1963) |
... a perpetual functioning of genius without truth, feeling, or any adequate matter to be functioning on.
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89) on Algernon Swinburne (1837-1909) |
... a poor, thin, spasmodic hectic shrill and pallid being.
Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) on Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) |
... a sort of gutless Kipling.
George Orwell (1903-50) on W. H. Auden (1907-73) |
... a tub of old guts.
Ezra Pound (1885-1972) on Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) |
... bent on groping for horror by night, and blinking like a stupid old owl when the warm sunlight of the best of life dances into his wrinkled eyes.
The Gentlewoman magazine on Henrik Ibsen |
... our authors are vulgar, gross, illiberal; the theatre swarms with wretched translations, and ballad operas and we have nothing new but improving abuse.
Horace Walpole (1717-97) on his life and time |
... stewed-up fragments of quotation in the sauce of a would-be dirty mind.
D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) on James Joyce (1882-1941) |
... there was little about melancholy that he didn't know; there was little else that he did.
W. H. Auden (1907-73) on Alfred, Lord Tennyson |
[A hook by Henry James] is like a church lit but without a congregation to distract you, with every light and line focused on the high altar. And on the altar, very reverently placed, intensely there, is a dead kitten, an eggshell, a bit of string.
H. G. Wells (1866-1946) on Henry James (1843-1916) |
[Looks like] an umbrella left behind at a picnic.
George Moore (1852-1933) on W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) |
A blatant Bassarid of Boston, a rampant Maenad of Massachusetts.
Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) on Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-96), humanitarian and novelist |
A cliche-ridden humbug and pie-fingering hack.
Dylan Thomas (1914-53) on Richard Church (1893-1972), author |
A coxcomb who would have gone into hysterics if a tailor had laughed at him.
Ebenezer Elliott (1781-1849), British poet and steel founder, on Lord Byron |
A desiccated bourgeois... a fossilised chauvinist, a self-satisfied Englishman.
Pravda on George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) |
A dirty man with opium-glazed eyes and rat-taily hair.
Lady Frederick Cavendish, British aristocrat, on Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-92) |
