Ancient and Modern Britons

make sense of it’, Empson argues, and literature is only the most successful end of life’s general business of attempting to ‘understand what people meant, why mum was cross’. Wood’s prose leaves room for us to hear the mixed seriousness and comedy of these baffling moments in Empson’s writing. Through such quiet ways of ‘using biography’ alongside criticism, On Empson goes beyond a sketch of Empson’s idiosyncrasies or dishevelments to remind us of the firmly human measures of his writing.