‘Personally,’ the young William Empson wrote in 1930, ‘I am attracted to the notion of a hearty indifference to one’s own and other people’s feelings, when a fragment of the truth is in question.’ That particular ‘notion’ is, of course, easier to formulate in youth than it is to maintain in the course of a full life; yet Empson did manage to live up to the principle until his death in 1984. By then, he was acknowledged internationally as the most brilliant literary critic of his generation, as well as one of its best poets, cherished by his friends and admirers, and respected (or feared) by those all too numerous lesser writers and critics who had had occasion to experience the force of his hearty indifference to their feelings.

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