“... is shining now. I must have lunch – found a big slug in my lettuce recently!In an interview with Ian Hamilton in 1964 Larkin expressed annoyance with reviewers of his work who complained that there was something ‘uniquely dreary’ about the experiences depicted in his poems. ‘I’d like to know how all these romantic reviewers spend their time ...”

“... pinched from Westminster and returned to Scotland by a young nationalist writer and singer called Ian Hamilton. Another opportunity arose not long afterwards, when the Post Office announced that the logogram EIIR would in future appear on all postboxes. Henderson was at a meeting held in Sorley MacLean’s flat to discuss how Scotland might respond. He ...”

“... This is the first part of a two-part interview. Part 2: ‘The Price’.Ian Hamilton died of cancer on 27 December 2001, aged 63. It was a death that the ‘LRB’ has especial cause to lament. He was a great support to this paper, helping to get it going in 1979, serving ever since on its editorial board, and above all contributing many exact, unsparing and funny pieces on poetry, on novels – and on football ...”

“... how much Hardwick was prepared to put up with to save her own marriage, during which, Saskia Hamilton notes in her introduction to The Dolphin Letters, Lowell ‘suffered at least ten major manic episodes and at least fifteen hospitalisations’. The first of many ‘other women’ was Giovanna Madonia, a music student whom Lowell met in Salzburg when he ...”

“... costs of regulation. The desire to control this kind of lobbying goes back at least to the Neil Hamilton ‘cash for questions’ scandal in the 1990s. Hamilton, a Tory minister (for deregulation) with bracingly right-wing views (pro-hanging, anti-NHS, anti-EU, anti-immigrants, with a whiff of anti-Semitism), took brown ...”

“... in September, carries an assurance that the novel will appeal to readers of Jonathan Franzen and Ian McEwan. Wow. McEwan’s name has become something of a hallmark: even John Updike can’t have a novel published in London without its being stamped on the cover (‘“The finest novelist writing in English today” ...”

“... inhuman sort of war’ – a longer, more diffuse but more interesting version of one printed by Ian Hamilton in his Poetry of War 1939-45 (first published in 1965 and in my opinion still the best anthology covering this terrain). Serving in the artillery, Currey describes shooting down an enemy aircraft, then running to try to rescue its crew from the ...”

“... defended his ‘privacy’. He fended off journalists and biographers, sometimes in the courts: Ian Hamilton was commissioned by Random House to write a biographical study subtitled ‘A Writing Life’, but permission to quote from Salinger’s unpublished letters was denied by the courts and Hamilton’s book ended ...”

“... for the London Magazine, then for Karl Miller at the New Statesman (and, eventually, the LRB). Ian Hamilton called her ‘Britain’s foremost literary shrew’. She was a strong, funny critic. She lost patience with Virginia Woolf’s novels (‘too devastatingly vague’) on discovering that ‘she thought you need a corkscrew to open a bottle of ...”

“... Brits like Richard Long and Gilbert and George, on old bugbears like Warhol and Richard Hamilton. Shortly before Fuller’s death, he thought the tide was turning: Serota seemed to be coming into line, even Saatchi was investing in the School of London. Then it turned right back. In his last completed book, Theoria: Art and the Absence of ...”

“... to Glasgow,’ she said, ‘but it would cost you a fortune to get back in a taxi. Even to get to Hamilton costs £22. But there’s nothing much else. There’s always a bit of trouble at the pubs. That’s the way it is, round here. We’re really just a town in the middle of the countryside.’Then to Ayrshire. We got to Montgreenan House Hotel in ...”

“... tried to draw it back into their domain. It’s a pity that this trawl misses the Scottish artist Ian Hamilton Finlay, who has long employed camouflage in works investigating Western pastoralism and the theme of death in arcadia. Instead, Blechman focuses on the French artist Alain Jacquet, who has used camouflage since the early 1960s, pulling it out of ...”

“... I watched it on my own. When you do that you concentrate harder and it takes more out of you, as Ian Hamilton said: ‘I don’t play football any more, but you should see me watch it.’ Underlying this is the point that a football match isn’t a spectacle but an experience: you don’t look at it, you live through it. This was England’s best ...”

“... excitement of his intelligence and the liveliness of his prose’. These are the words of Saskia Hamilton, the poet who has undertaken the arduous and complicated task of editing this selection. She remarks in her introduction that the letters differ from the poetry in that they ‘are not reshaped, dismantled and made again in the daylight of his ...”

“... with a stairway to heaven. The steps, coincidentally, chime in with a poem by the recently dead Ian Hamilton printed in the LRB. We are on a kind of stair. The world below Will never be regained; was never there Perhaps. And yet it seems We’ve climbed to where we are With diligence, as if told long ago How high the highest rung. 23 January. To ...”