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“... life (‘not to be too much of a naturalist and so overlook the beauty of things, or too much of a poet and so fail to understand them’), and diagnosing himself as melancholic. ‘As long as he has good health, a man need never despair,’ he writes at 17, but he’s already troubled by ‘cinema pictures of the circumstances of my death’. He spends a lot ...”

“... is the English College, or the Venerable English College, as its fanbase likes to call it. Father Clive was waiting on the steps for me. He was in his late twenties, very neat, soft-toned and red-cheeked, and he welcomed me into the building in the manner of someone obeying time and tradition, naming the exact moment on his watch before telling me I was the ...”

“... both omniscient and a little lost. A cool vertigo.‘He was, of course, the first “modern” poet.’ Larkin’s scare quotes are a reminder that Auden had reservations about modernity. ‘What do you think about England,’ the Old Boy asks in The Orators (1932), ‘this country of ours where nobody is well?’ Auden came of age between the wars, and ...”

“... called him ‘just, pitiless and gentle’. The Goncourt Journal reports the verdict of the poet Henri de Régnier: ‘A real original, born in Italy and looking like an American. An intelligent man who is trying to turn himself into a character and impress people with his epigrams … But a man of heart, goodness and sensitivity, belonging wholly to ...”

“... upon the door’ – an encounter less abstract than ‘relationships with public power’. The poet is to that extent more Orwellian than Crick. As it happens, MacNeice’s poem is a poor one, but we remember it because he often wrote well, and because he, sometimes more accurately than Auden, caught the mood and posture of that moment, expressed a ...”

“... and turn professor’, but this was very wide of the mark, as Horace Walpole and his friend the poet William Mason were quick to point out. Mason’s verse retort to Chambers was admired by Hester Thrale for its ‘Fire and pungent Satire’. Whatever the elusive details of his personality may have been, Brown was clearly a respecter of persons only up to a ...”

“... of J. Alfred Prufrock’. He had decided he must stay in London, there to launch his career as a poet. This was the course recommended by his new friend and admirer Ezra Pound, to whom he had shown some of his work. Europe, Pound could testify, was the best, the only place for any American aspirant to literary or artistic preferment. If you can make it ...”

“... the subject of your first full-length biography. You did and do admire him greatly as a poet, yet in his poetic practice didn’t he trample all over the distinctions, the reticences and borderlines, you set so much store by in your own verse?Yes. I suppose that is where the whole idea of confessional poetry came from. There are two factors with ...”

“... tracks they leave behind).The Abbotsford thought of Karl as their Nachwuchs – the next young poet. But he went south to Cambridge, to Downing College and the throne of F.R. Leavis, and became eventually and primarily a critic and editor. There was an opinion that Leavis had strangled a promising nightingale. Certainly Karl’s first important critical ...”

“... and Lukacs. Thematically, Doctor Criminale shapes up as a kind of post-Maastricht version of Henry James’s international theme: English ingenuousness discovers corruption beneath the seductive surfaces of European civilisation. For all his postgraduate knowingness about Barthes and other purveyors of the higher froggy nonsense, Francis is revealed to be a ...”

“... made by the great swordsmith Yasukuni of the Soshu Branch of the Sagami School’). The best that Clive James – a regular visitor and student of Japanese – could come up with was the smirking comedy Brrm! Brrm! Only two novelists have filtered Japanese characters into English with any conviction, and neither of them has made a home in the ...”

“... Calata devotes a significant part of My Father Died for This to his great-grandfather Canon James Calata, secretary general of the ANC from 1936 to 1949, who brought his politics to the pulpit and was central in making Cradock the politically conscious and active community for which it was still being punished in the early 1990s. Fort, ...”

“... similarly gruelling routines had to be rolled around the palate and the tongue many a time before Clive James suddenly exclaimed: “A Shropshire Cunt by A.E. Sockprong”.’ I have a Y chromosome, so I can just about see that this is funny. But I can’t imagine that it was enough, as Hitchens suggests, ‘to make the long interludes of puerility ...”

“... movement was very noticeable; also a theme in the first movement, a fine march.’ In the novel, Clive Durham plays this 5/4 movement – in effect a metrically odd waltz – on the pianola to Maurice at one of their early encounters. Much later, hearing the work in concert, Maurice is told by Risley that Tchaikovsky fell in love with his own nephew ‘and ...”