“... died. She also includes written evidence from the distant past: letters by Blunt’s schoolfriend Louis MacNeice, for instance, and most startlingly, the brisk character sketches written for his masters in Moscow by Arnold Deutsch, the agent who recruited Blunt in London. There are some instances when she might have ignored the testimony she ...”

“... in 1947. Bertrand Russell, Isaiah Berlin, Tippett, Betjeman and Fred Hoyle became familiar voices. Louis MacNeice and Dylan Thomas made a poet’s living in what Thomas called ‘the thin puce belfries’ of the Third. Guided by the producer Douglas Cleverdon, Under Milk Wood and Beckett’s All That Fall came into being; and drama thrived – the careers ...”

“... of the worst shooting performances in finals history.To find out what chasing the Grail is like, Louis MacNeice wrote, you should talk to Lancelot not Galahad. After all, Lancelot had to think about it his whole life – Galahad, to use the Nike slogan, just did it. I don’t think I’m spoiling it for anyone when I say that Riley’s Knicks never won ...”

“... against authority, which began with Blunt’s early exposure to modern art. At Marlborough, he and Louis MacNeice bounced rubber balls across the rounders pitch, held elaborate teas, and generally thumbed their noses at their games-playing peers. Blunt disdained politics, ‘preferred Things to People’, and immersed himself in the writings of Roger Fry ...”

“... his gift, would he have been a better poet if he had written only poetry? Auden ends his elegy for Louis MacNeice with some lines about poetic careers that, if true, would be too devastating for any poet to read:      God may reduce you on Judgment Day      to tears of shame, reciting by heart      the poems you would have written, had ...”

“... of distance that so terrorised generations of schoolchildren (‘crusted with parasangs’, as Louis MacNeice described the Anabasis). One way of dealing with this problem is actually to follow Xenophon’s route oneself. The first such attempt was made in 1818 by John Macdonald Kinneir, of the East India Company. The resulting Journey through Asia ...”

“... intellectuals and writers, much as Ireland is on hers (‘she is both a bore and a bitch,’ wrote Louis MacNeice). In the same way Australia is inescapable subject-matter; and the strongest claims are not, of course, those of back-country endurance, or sentimental constructions of Edenic Aboriginality – let alone the phony stuff about ‘national ...”

“... your nonsense. Yet here Frost too recognises a rival – the human and artistic imperative which Louis MacNeice defined during the Second World War: ‘Death is the opposite of decay: a stimulus, a necessary horizon.’ Thomas at the Front ‘doubted if anybody here thinks less of home than I do and yet ... loves it more’. He did not have to go to ...”

“... in and fed material to Private Eye. Introduced in his youth to Fitzrovia, he knew Dylan Thomas, Louis MacNeice and Julian Maclaren-Ross, and wrote with sufficient extra-historical purchase to make it into Margaret Drabble’s Oxford Companion to English Literature (to his immoderate delight). His memoirs were a Book at Bedtime. He received the Légion ...”

“... of children to chronicle – one in the 1930s with the painter Nancy Sharp, who forsook him for Louis MacNeice, one in the 1960s with Monica Hoyer from the Slade liferoom – but most enjoys himself sifting the correspondence at the turn of the 1940s with Sonia Brownell, who comes out of this book with recommendations few others have wanted to lend ...”

“... the Music of Time), William Walton, Dylan Thomas, Augustus John, Elisabeth Lutyens, John Lehmann, Louis Macneice, Alan Rawsthorne, Michael Ayrton. In the dark background are the diabolic Bernard Van Dieren and Philip Heseltine (‘Peter Warlock’), two men, composer-writers like himself, to whom Lambert maintained a fierce loyalty, before and after ...”

“... out in the Folk Museum? I wonder. Not yet, though all being well it’ll be traced there one day. Louis MacNeice, who was a Home Ruler, said that his heart leapt to the sound of a pipe band – same here. And when I look up at an Orange arch over a main street I recognise with delight the Masonic symbolism of Jacob’s ladder and open book (as in ...”

“... room swayed. Against the bar, and against most things, you might have found Nina Hamnett next to Louis MacNeice, the maharajah of Cooch Behar next to Joan Littlewood, Christine Keeler taking advice from Lord Goodman or conversing with Leonard Blackett (the Military Cross-winning hero of the Somme – ‘she was a brave little soldier’). E.M. Forster ...”

“... mother, drive them away in different vans. ‘The poet’s first business is mentioning things,’ Louis MacNeice wrote. Spring is possessed of a spooling, associative structure which, as a kind of fiction of rapid response, gets down on paper much that was humming and raging in the UK in 2018, before history or even a particular literary form could be ...”

“... the accomplishment of the 19th and early 20th-century bourgeoisie, who enjoyed, in the words of Louis MacNeice, ‘the privilege . . . of learning a language that is incontrovertibly dead’ – as well as the privilege of seeing others excluded from learning it. For practitioners of the learned professions, Latin served another set of purposes, some ...”