Out of Bounds 
Ian Gilmour
- The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period by William St Clair
‘Johnson wrote The Lives of the Poets,’ Elizabeth Barrett Browning grumbled, ‘and left out the poets.’ She exaggerated, of course, but a book of that title which omitted Chaucer and Shakespeare, Spenser and all the Elizabethans, Donne and nearly all the Jacobeans, while including a host of nonentities, such as Pomfret, Stepney, Dyer, Smith, Duke and King, was at the very least defective and misleading. The fault was not Dr Johnson’s. The guilty men, as a contemporary noted, were not ‘the illustrious scholar but his employers, who thought themselves . . . the best judges of vendible poetry’.
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Ian Gilmour was secretary of state for defence under Edward Heath and deputy foreign secretary under Margaret Thatcher. He died on 21 September 2007.
Other articles by this contributor:
Little Mercians · why Kenneth Clarke should lead the Tories
Dingy Quadrilaterals · the Profumo Case
The Horrors of Heathrow · Ian Gilmour at the Terminal 5 Enqiry
Vote for the Beast! · the Tory Leadership
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