“... 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 Sotheby’s ...”

“... 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 intelligence ...”

“... in the Obama, Bush and Clinton administrations. For hawks, such as the US trade representative Robert Lighthizer and Trump’s favourite economic adviser, Peter Navarro, the question is why the effort to enrol China in the world economy was undertaken in the first place, and who benefited from an experiment that has gone so badly wrong.The crude Trumpian ...”

“... milieu and the Parisian literary underground made familiar in the scholarly work of Robert Darnton. At a longer distance, the aim is to declare Gillray the blood brother of ‘tinkers, tailors, blacksmiths, cobblers’. The scratched and stippled surface of an abandoned Gillray sketch is said to show his ‘unusual attempt to increase the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is the second part of a two-part interview. Part 1: ‘You Muddy Fools’ I want to ask you about Robert Lowell: as an influence on your work, that is, and only then as what he later became – a ‘Life’, 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 ...”

“... from an outer borough. New Yorkers hardly have a bias against aspiring newcomers. The musical Hamilton exalts a classic New York story of a brilliant young immigrant rising in a mercantile culture. (‘I hear it’s highly overrated,’ President-elect Trump tweeted last November after the cast addressed Vice President-elect Mike Pence, as he was leaving ...”