Howard Henry Erskine-Hill, FBA (19 June 1936 – 26 February 2014) was an English literary scholar most notable for his work on the eighteenth century poet Alexander Pope.
[4] His next book, The Augustan Idea in English Literature, was published in 1983 and explored how writers from the time of Shakespeare to Pope used the Roman Emperor Augustus and his associated poets Virgil and Horace as a model to praise or criticise politics.
I acknowledge the principle of truth as the end of scholarship, and have no interest in the production of subjective myth in the guise of criticism, or in the mere multiplication of readings none of which has any greater probability than the rest".
[7] In his review, Frank Kermode complained of the "vanity" of Erskine-Hill's "mock-modest tone" in the introduction and said it was "quite deplorable" from "so pedestrian an author to put on such airs".
[8] Emrys Jones called it "an ambitious and impressive work" which was not only "exceptional in the scope and quality of its reading but deeply considered in what it has to say".
The pamphlet he wrote with Hugh Mellor exclaimed that "the major preoccupation and effect of [Derrida's] voluminous work has been to deny and to dissolve those standards of evidence and argument on which all academic disciples are based".
[2] He explained in the introduction to the first volume: The chief contention of this book is that there is a political comment, often involving contemporary political ideas and historical circumstance, in some of the most powerful poetic works of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature, works which have in the past been usually read for their aesthetic achievement and generalized wisdom.
[12] Erskine-Hill's political views were originally left-wing; he was a Labour voter and a supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament but he moved to the right whilst at Cambridge.
[2] Later on he embraced Euroscepticism; in 1991 he wrote to Thatcher to try and dissuade her from retiring from the House of Commons so that she could lead the campaign against a federal Europe.