“... but having read his prose essay on the family, it was as if he was just versifying bits of it. ‘Home after Three Months away’ and ‘Man and Wife’, though, really hit me as what poems should be. There are about half a dozen poems that had that kind of impact on me: the passionate speaking voice and intimate subject-matter. The internal rhymes and basic ...”

“... nowadays they are all buried under concrete, except for the farm at Toddhill, which became a home for the mentally handicapped. In my youth they had been like haunted houses. There were echoes in the barns.Those farms seemed as remote from the daily reality of our lives as the one in the wedding picture. We would never live there: computer factories and ...”

“... Without it, he said, he and his men would have ‘looked complete fools with the government at home, having led them up the garden path to believe that Nehru would accept the plan’, and ‘Dickie Mountbatten would have been finished and could have packed his bag.’ The invaluable Menon was to hand, and the day was saved when he redrafted the plan to ...”