“... the CIA involvement in its finances, another idea came up. Some of those figures like Stephen Spender, Frank Kermode and Stuart Hampshire wanted to start a counter-magazine.I don’t think ‘Encounter’ had folded by then.No, it hadn’t but Spender had left. Spender was a big ...”

“... aspect of life which consists of just one damned thing “and” after another.’ The opening of Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ has something of this effect:Listen! you hear the grating roarOf pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,At their return, up the high strand,Begin, and cease, and then again begin,With tremulous cadence slow, and bringThe ...”

“... action. Has the Abbey Theatre done nothing for Ireland?’Many years later, in a letter to Stephen Spender, Auden described Yeats as ‘my own devil of unauthenticity’ and referred to the ‘false emotions, inflated rhetoric, empty sonorities’ in his work. As he embarked on his poem in memory of Yeats, he must have been aware of the kind of criticism he ...”