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“... thy name is Samuel Johnson’), where the Doctor delivers infallible negatives on the poet’s work – what else should a Scot expect? – and the fine satire ‘A Poem in Praise of the British’, where the tatters of Empire drift through the dreams of ‘old pederasts on the Brighton promenade’.Barbarians (1979) marked two significant and ...”

“... Christmas at Addenbrooke’s. One day I had a fever and was speaking in tongues, and Chloe and the Poet thought I was dying, although, as I pointed out, just to announce that one is a cucumber doesn’t count as consent to termination. But I didn’t die because they got the drip feed under my skin and poured their potion of antibiotics in fast enough. I was a ...”

“... Names like Patrick White and A.D. Hope were greeted with candid derision, and nobody had heard of Clive James.* When, at one of the actual Festival’s talk-ins, I said that it was odd to find Peter Porter missing from various standard anthologies of Australian verse, I was given the clear impression that P.P. had simply got what he deserved. Among poets ...”

“... of the well-known and the distinguished, neatly making the distinction between the two: ‘Was it Clive James or Jorge Luis Borges, the famous Argentine poet, who pointed out that if we saw every leaf on the tree we would go mad?’ But it takes a talent of greater stamina and range to realise these skills over 184 ...”

“... rehearse it again and again. 2. General Absolution is too much for even a Catholic confessional poet to hope for. 3. That he should resist more firmly the idea that he must be the best Irish poet since Yeats, which arose from rather casual remarks by the power-crazed Robert Lowell and the craze-powered ...”

“... approves, has undoubtedly occurred, as a root through the enormous heap of books about the poet, now augmented by the centenary of his birth, will quickly demonstrate. By the time of his death in 1965 people had long been curious about this very famous man. Collections such as the one made by Richard Marsh and Tambimuttu for his 60th birthday in 1948 ...”

“... President, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, and some reminiscences about Auden by the Icelandic poet Matthías Johannessen. It is published in paperback and contains 14 black and white photographs, no maps, no diagrams and no reading list. My own copy of the book is dog-eared and dirty after a few read-throughs, and the spine has virtually disintegrated. In ...”

“... J.M. Coetzee’s phrase from another context – is either played for laughs or set against the poet’s ‘sun-comprehending’ side. In the life documented by Thwaite and Motion, though, it could be seen as the animating principle of everything from Larkin’s strangled sexual existence to his dislike of ‘niggers’, the poor, most other writers, other ...”

“... advocate, collaborated on a new translation with the publisher Nikos Stangos, himself Greek and a poet, of 14 of the Cavafy poems, which were illustrated by 12 of the etchings. The transmission of the poems, from the cultural revolution of the 1960s to Pride today, could well lead many admirers to imagine Cavafy never wrote in another language. His most ...”

“... historian, conscious of history as drama, very often tragedy. His tribute to Raleigh, rising as a poet above his pettier self and that of his age, is discerning. He has a frequently compelling turn of phrase. ‘Ireland, of course, is irony’s chosen country,’ he remarks on the oddity of Burke, emotional and romantic, coming to be venerated as founder of ...”

“... John Taylor, the journalist, newspaper editor and poet, was born in 1757. His grandfather, the legendary ‘Chevalier’ Taylor, had been oculist to George II, and afterwards, so his grandson assures us, to ‘every crowned head in Europe’. He was as famous for his womanising as for his knowledge of ophthalmology, but most famous, perhaps, for his habit of prefacing every operation he performed with a long speech in praise of his own skill, composed in what he claimed was ‘the true Ciceronian’, with each main verb cunningly held back to the end of the sentence ...”

“... September’, because I knew the house just outside Enniscorthy where it was set and I had met the poet’s wife, whose sleeping figure was evoked in the poem. What was most interesting about it, though, was the way it left the familiar behind and moved into a set of images and cadences that I could not fully understand: It is as though The black breathing ...”

“... in a T-shirt and leather vest, with lurid tattoos on his arms. He didn’t look like any sort of poet to me, more like a predatory sex addict.’ The Lodge was long gone, but Ty’s, a new leather bar on Christopher Street, became a favourite. ‘I’ve never enjoyed New York so much,’ Gunn wrote of a visit in 1973. At Ty’s he met Pieter Sweval of the ...”

“... isn’t the person I married,’ and one doesn’t need to be unwell to feel what Henry James felt, writing to Rhoda Broughton in November 1915 after she had praised one of (what he called) his ‘old perpetrations’: ‘I think of it, the masterpiece in question, as the work of quite another person than myself, at this date – that of a rich (so ...”

“... of it or not, all four of them also betray confusion, flux and anxiety. The dust-jacket blurb of James Lees-Milne’s People and Places suggests this right away. His book, it tells us, is an ‘extraordinary, amusing and touching picture ... of an England now lost’. The story will be a familiar one to those who have read his published diaries. In ...”