“... to pull that off,’ he said.‘Good, isn’t it?’ I said.‘Oh, tops. Really terrific. I told Ian Hamilton in his digs once that I loved that poem especially and he nearly hit me.’‘Why?’‘Because he hated it. I think he thought it was a terrible effusion of sentiment. But all the superlatives and exaggerations and colloquial high spoken ...”

“... enough of savage solemnity. ‘An important quality for poets is knowing exactly where to stop,’ Ian Hamilton said in an unimpressed review at the time, finding the Achilles’ heel of Hughes’s poetry to be the way it ‘flogs on until it is drained, replete’, and even his admirers must concede there’s something in that. Hughes, whose large ...”

“... in a moment of rage; portions of some of his letters to Caroline Blackwood were transcribed by Ian Hamilton for his biography, but the letters themselves were stolen and have not resurfaced. Bishop’s letters to Lota de Macedo Soares were destroyed after Lota’s suicide. But there remain many unpublished letters by Bishop and Lowell. An edition of ...”

“... above the lip – this explains the philtrum – and wipes its mind clean. The unborn narrator of Ian McEwan’s new novel, Nutshell, isn’t omniscient but has formidable mental powers, able to analyse, synthesise and, necessarily, use language. He also has tastes, preferences, opinions, all of which logically depend on something he hasn’t ...”

“... to fill in the spaces. The tone of it reminds me of the tone of Lowell’s conversation with Ian Hamilton from 1971, mechanically clever but distant and deaf, all denatured one-liners and musing rhetorical questions. It’s not conversation but the complacent burble of a radio on a windowsill. History is about as broad as Lowell gets, a custard-pie ...”

“... early positivist description of the mind in terms of mental states. (A footnote of Sir William Hamilton, 1837: ‘The term State has, more especially of late years, and principally by Necessitarian philosophers, been applied to all modifications of mind, indifferently.’) I admire the directness of dumping the mind and proceeding to what Patricia ...”

“... to Wittgenstein, was deposited, on ‘permanent loan’, at nearby UCL. The Penguin and Hamish Hamilton archives are, substantially, on loan at Bristol University library, in recognition of Allen Lane’s birthplace. In the 1970s Ian Fletcher and Jim Edwards at Reading University had the bright idea of offering ...”

“... One of the myths that fuzzes the shadowy outline of Ian Penman, a laureate of marginal places, folds in the map, is that Paul Schrader, the director of a sassy remake of Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People, admired Penman’s review so much that he invited him over to Los Angeles to talk product. Penman in California was truly the vision of a man who fell to earth, a pale alien in an X Files landscape ...”

“... a determination to bring down Sturgeon.Three inquiries were set up into the Salmond affair. James Hamilton, a former director of public prosecutions in Ireland, has been investigating the possibility that Sturgeon breached the ministerial code, while Laura Dunlop’s review of the harassment complaints procedure has just reported (she recommended that, in ...”

“... chap who came from Birmingham or somewhere. Another story came in unsolicited from someone called Ian McEwan. There did seem to be these gifted people out there, so we were up and running. People I knew about, like you and Edna O’Brien, were also in the first issue and there were a couple of new things. What was coming in was nothing like as bad, on the ...”

“... his recall to current political debate, if only to induce a necessary modesty. K.J. Fielding and Ian Campbell, the British side of the joint Anglo-American team producing the letters, have taken time off to edit Carlyle’s Reminiscences. They have stripped away the varnish laid on by previous editors and reinserted what earlier prudence deleted. The ...”

“... and birth control – rested on the concept that motherhood was the true vocation of women. Cicely Hamilton, redoubtable ‘old feminist’, crossly noted that the protective legislation of the inter-war years treated women ‘from youth to age as if they were permanently pregnant’. The first reaction to the outbreak of the First World War was the ...”

“... for questions’ controversy also later accounted for two senior ministers, Tim Smith and Neil Hamilton, who had to leave their posts at the Northern Ireland Office and the Department of Trade respectively. The paradox behind this extraordinary succession of resignations is that none of them has been for what traditional constitutional law would suggest ...”

“... Is that what heroines have to do? This is perhaps the most troubling of the questions canvassed in Ian Donaldson’s cool and lucid tracing of what his subtitle calls ‘a myth and its transformations’. The book, which looks at paintings and works of philosophy as well as works of literature, is interested in the relations between ‘art and argument’. At ...”

“... often with non-publishing or foreign management at the highest level. Penguin, Hamish Hamilton, Michael Joseph, Frederick Warne and Longman – all once imprints with independent identities – now congregate within the Pearson group (best known for its ownership of the Financial Times). Random House UK (whose American parent was long since ...”