“... in this book), but anyway looks uncertain of its status, like a joke title thought up by W.H. Auden for a poem. The parodies provide a respite from this nightmare. Even incidentally, there’s a broad, unlikely set of references to literature – to Saki and John Fowles and Gatsby’s ‘old sport’. In more detail, a character called Clem Snide does a ...”

“... the National Health Service. The world of Stanley Baldwin contained more reasons for admiring W.H. Auden than this book understands. The sense of having read a genuinely responsible work of history of science remains. To take only the most obvious examples from Kevles’s last chapters: his useful warnings against expecting too much from pre-natal medical ...”

“... Powell, Peter Quennell, Tom Driberg, Harold Acton, Christopher Sykes, Randolph Churchill, W.H. Auden, and lots of others, including Gaitskell once more (‘Hugh, may I stroke your bottom?’ ‘Oh, I suppose so, if you must’). With Auden he went to bed; also, according to Hillier (citing Peter Quennell), he ...”

“... the editor has to turn to the much less reliable Howard Griffin (who also, in his turn, became Auden’s secretary) and to two other volunteers, women who had preserved their notes from the spring term.The result reads like a remarkably full account of what the poet said about Shakespeare but also about many other matters. At the time of the lectures he ...”

“... German Literature’. In the introduction to their translation of the Italian Journey (1962), W.H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer sought to explain and excuse British ignorance of, and indifference to, Goethe by drawing attention to the undeniable fact that his work is particularly resistant to translation into English. This is to be expected in the case of ...”

“... get no further than the preface to the Companion, they will see what another Oxford wit, W.H. Auden, said of the same material: ‘I was spellbound. This poetry, I learned knew, was going to be my dish... I learned enough to read it, and Anglo-Saxon and Middle English poetry have been one of my strongest, most lasting influences.’ Readers might wonder ...”

“... the Circuit’, a poem about the circle of purgatory reserved for touring poet-lecturers, W.H. Auden mentioned the moments of unanticipated connection: Or blessed encounter, full of joy Unscheduled on the Giesen Plan, With, here, an addict of Tolkien, There, a Charles Williams fan.If Auden were on the circuit now, he’d ...”

“... America’), H.G. Wells (‘Futuristic America’), D.H. Lawrence (‘Primitive America’), W.H. Auden (‘Theological America’), Aldous Huxley (Psychedelic America’), and Christopher Isherwood (‘Mystical America’). As the chapter titles suggest, each of these writers is supposed to see America as if it were shaped by a literary genre or in ...”

“... but the pith of it. Well before the back-bench existence ever occurred to him, he had given W.H. Auden his first reading of The Waste Land; had been the only witness as Evelyn Waugh was ‘received’ into Holy Mother Church; had been saluted by Edith Sitwell as the hope of English poetry; had been anointed as the diabolic successor to Aleister Crowley; had ...”

“... modern English poetry will recognise as an imitation, and not a very good one, of a poem by W.H. Auden. Parsler composes it while he is lying supine and fully clothed in a stream. We are told that ‘it took some minutes of playing with words and rhymes until he arrived at something he could accept and then forget about.’ In fact, ...”

“... be less to work on, and this book is evidence that we’ll be a little the poorer for it. W.H. Auden became convinced that in some of his prewar poetry he had been telling lies or advocating causes in which he no longer believed. Indeed he had come to think that it had been wicked to write in support of such causes. Poetry itself was suspect: ‘Nothing is ...”

“... Own Paper sort of chap crippled young by a kick from his horse, was obliquely immortalised by W.H. Auden: Will you wheel death anywhere In his invalid chair. Auden briefly and reluctantly tutored their son, and his nocturnal hospitality to Christopher Isherwood was announced with distaste by the family butler. Her long ...”

“... her association with men was perfectly equal, a certain gentleness would be lost to man.’ W.H. Auden takes a giant swing at woman’s awful influence on opera. Opera, he says, convincingly, depends on wilfulness, and women as the leads in opera wreck everything because they keep on fitting in and shutting up. ‘The passivity of Mimi, for example, almost ...”

“... impersonal authority of tradition, which the individual talent must allow to flow through it. W.H. Auden tells us that ‘we are lived by powers we pretend to understand,’ while structuralists set out to identify the secret presence of these powers in the workings of particular cultures. If language becomes a major protagonist for 20th-century ...”

“... creative artists. Nuttall declares that the ‘presiding genius’ of his third chapter is W.H. Auden – by implication, the Auden of The Dyer’s Hand. But Auden is an extremely dangerous guardian angel. Although The Sea and the Mirror, the series of poems in which he allowed his ...”