“... 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 ...”

“... have read years ago and forgotten. Tipped in, as booksellers say, is a letter from a woman about Louis MacNeice, on whom I’d done a TV programme and who was a friend of Grigson’s. She had known Grigson and he had told her how en route to Fawley Bottom to have lunch with John Piper one Sunday in 1939 he and ...”

“... not encourage him in his deviant designs. Among his colleagues at the BBC were George Orwell and Louis MacNeice, both of whom he greatly admired; and there were others, their names by now probably forgotten, who brought conviction and real knowledge to Empson’s side of the fight. One such, Ralf Bonwit, a formidable, dedicated Japanese specialist, was ...”

“... Smith (later a distinguished BBC producer of drama and already clearly with a good eye for it) and Louis MacNeice, whose impassive fantastic wit lights up every one of the handful of pages on which he appears. It is MacNeice who remarks of his fellow poet on their trip to Iceland together that ‘everything he touches ...”

“... most English day of our relationship’ during which they achieved ‘a feeling of communion’. Louis MacNeice sharply discerned ‘Stephen’s lust to mythologise the world in which he walked’, and the various accounts of his discipleship do have a mythical quality about them. They generalise about the young Auden’s manners and opinions, and ...”

“... good bookshop, with English books, and a hotel, justly described by W.H. Auden in the book he and Louis MacNeice wrote about Iceland as not the kind of thing you like if you like that kind of thing. The only drink was sherry, imported from Spain under some mutual trade agreement and exempted from the general prohibition of liquor. The Icelanders quite ...”

“... for their verve and spontaneity; for the glimpses we get of Eliot’s ‘huge thick hands’; Louis MacNeice talking like ‘a quick-fire car salesman’; Pound’s ‘dead button eyes’; Lowell’s manic fits; Auden’s ‘strangely wrinkled face, like a Viking seaman – that sort of tan & wrinkles. Like a reptile – though not squamous, not ...”

“... Louis MacNeice, it was sometimes said, was always in the pub but never really of it. Much the same could be said of Patrick Hamilton, who was best known in his lifetime for his stage chillers Rope (1929) and Gaslight (1938), but is mostly remembered for the expert depictions of joyless interwar boozing in Hangover Square (1941) and the trilogy Twenty Thousand Streets under the Sky (1929-34 ...”

“... although Desmond was ‘full of go, a handsome Guard-ee type’, Penelope had ‘the brains’. Louis MacNeice, Stevie Smith, L.P. Hartley were among the Review’s English-language contributors, but stronger indications of Fitzgerald’s inner life and future come from the pieces she wrote, signed and unsigned: about Jarry, Munch, Moravia, Medardo ...”

“... loose-jointedness may be a merit in a poet’s mind. Auden called him ‘a parody Parsifal’, and Louis MacNeice drily spoke of his ‘redeeming the world by introspection’. In almost all these accounts, his good looks feature prominently (‘the Rupert Brooke of the Depression’), as do his celebrated innocence and others’ doubts about its ...”

“... the people who worked at Broadcasting House would meet for drinks during and after working hours. Louis MacNeice conferenced there and the Light Entertainment people came and went too, en route to other haunts. A schoolboy who was part of a team that had done well on Top of the Form told me Gamlin was extremely sweet to him and ‘a nice man all ...”

“... going to be able to review the last book he had been sent. It was a selection of the letters of Louis MacNeice, and of course one immediately thinks how good it would have been to have had one of his quietly perceptive, deftly modulated assessments of a writer whom he had read when he was an undergraduate at Liverpool in the late 1930s and still partly ...”

“... Leslie Halward and John Hampson, and poets with a background in the city, such as W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, avoided living there if they could. In public, Neville Chamberlain would praise the city for which he was an MP and with which his family was so closely identified; privately, he sneered that ‘all the people of cultivation go to ...”

“... to disparage the art long before his removal to America. In 1936, on the way to Iceland with Louis MacNeice, he read Don Juan for the first time, and composed a long and brilliant verse letter to Lord Byron, in which he remarked approvingly on Byron’s anti-romantic cast of mind, and invited his new dead friend to agree that ‘novel writing is/A ...”

“... expand and dissolve into what might rather be called ‘Pope’s world’ than ‘Pope’. Louis MacNeice once referred in a poem to what he called the ‘tea-coloured afternoons’ of Poussin’s paintings. That there is something of the tea-coloured afternoon in Mack’s biography is not inappropriate to its subject. And it certainly adds to the ...”