“... but as neurosis, emotional repression, the inability to love: there is much more D.H. Lawrence and Blake in them than there is Mr Marx. And of course a lot of Freud, mostly not in particulars but in the diffusely Freudian cast of mind – the ‘climate of opinion’, in Auden’s famous phrase – which, contemplating the whole range of human damage, finds ...”

“... And heard in the churchyard a biblical echo. “In the year that King Uzziah died I saw also the Lord …”’ If her lines are unusually memorable, it is because they scan: first the sea, then the Bible, then the whole of English literature.It was the weight of influence that sat so heavily on the Leavis generation. A teacher, for those symbolic eleven ...”

“... and beautifully is in the order of poetry,’ the Greenock-born journalist and novelist George Blake wrote. ‘The pride of a seafaring nation and of a shipbuilding race were utterly engaged. This mass of metal had become the symbol of national self-respect. To leave her unfinished would have been as unthinkable as, shall we say, to scuttle half the ...”