The Quest for Love published a year ago, is the best of the dozen books – of poetry, of criticism, of short stories, of works on teaching and of anthologies for teachers – that Mr David Holbrook has put out in the last five years. Something of his programme, and of a distinctive overtone that accompanies it, can be seen if we go back to his dispute with a Times Literary Supplement critic in 1962. Writing in reply to a fairly stinging review of Llareggub Revisited, his book on Dylan Thomas, Mr Holbrook affirmed (and that seems the right word for it): ‘It is true that I feel strongly that literature is of little value unless it brings us deeper perceptions and insights into our own nature, and the nature of our living conditions, in time and mortality. For this reason I seek to write with gravity .. .’

What he intended, he suggested, was ‘a quest for gravity, in the art of writing, and in personal living’. Yet there is a kind of quest for gravity, and a kind of quest for love, which makes us pause. To care so much is a great thing, to declare oneself openly is an honest act which we see too seldom, but aren’t the references to time and mortality uncomfortably over-large, embarrassingly imprecise? A quality of Puritanism, as Hooker knew, is to think too little of the multiple lesser needs and laws that govern our lives, to concede a kind of hypertrophy to the greatest and (at worst) to dismiss with rancour those who cultivate the less.