“... 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 ...”

“... possible to be well-briefed about Karl before meeting him for the first time. This was thanks to Clive James’s introduction to his collection Visions before Midnight. James said that Karl, who’d commissioned him to write about TV for the Listener, was brilliant, forceful and very very funny: ‘When he was in the mood to scorn the follies of the day, his ...”

“... hadn’t been able to use in quite the right way or who’d been anonymous. There were people like Clive James who had appeared in the later issues of the Review. He was terrific and I wanted to use him. I felt I had enough younger people whom I admired, and still had my old chums from the Review, Colin, Hugo, David Harsent; they just carried over and became ...”