William Empson

But, you know, not to be too much of a fogy about it.

But, you know, we might not include William Empson in the old criticism.

He's a kind of radical of h- of his own school.

Yes.

I mean, William Empson is sort of unclass-- is a sort of unclassifiable one-off really, isn't he? But I think everybody, everybody smart in the old school likes Empson.

I'm quite ambivalent about Empson.

It's, yeah, I mean-

I am, I am a sucker for it, and I just sort of...

And then he goes back in June, along with other writers.

William Empson is there and...

Angela Carter and other very distinguished people to celebrate Joyce and then they unveil a bust of Joyce on St. Stephen's Green.

Now it's true Joyce ends this book and there's no narrative beyond that but Just after he finished writing it, Burgess wrote to Peter de Sautoy, who was actually one of the administrators of Joyce's estate, and the man who'd commissioned Burgess to write Here Comes Everybody, his first commentary on Joyce, and A Short of Finnegan's Wake.

At school I was told that ambiguous, along with ambivalent, were potent words.

They were the words of the day, coming, of course, from William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity.

You had to use them every day, as frequently as loo paper.

So at every opportunity I sprinkled them in my essays to signify that I had a fizzing intellectual mind.