Barbara Everett

Yes.

Um, now you've been reading Barbara Everett.

Yes.

Tell me what you like about her work.

Yes.

Um, John Bayley was the husband of Iris Murdoch and was a, an advocate for I think are probably now quite unfashionable, but a humane, warm, textually attentive kind of criticism that I think took a serious blow in the latter half of the 20th century from literary theory, which likes, in my view, incomprehensible jargon and, um, you know, and, uh, uh, sort of vast unsupported nonsense words and ideas.

And Barbara Everett belongs to me to that tradition of criticism.

The b- the book I was reading was called Poets in Time, a series of essays on poets from John Donne to Philip Larkin.