“... for them to clear up the mess. ‘As usual’ I was piously preparing to write but then I read how Louis MacNeice died. He caught a chill down a pothole in Yorkshire while producing a documentary for the BBC and was taken into University College Hospital. He was accustomed at this time to drinking a bottle of whisky a day but being an NHS patient was not ...”

“... work having, as it were, jumped into three-dimensional life on stage. Wright, his erstwhile mentor Louis Sullivan and Mamah Cheney are not much less bohemian than the crew of the Brooklyn household; and the spirit and influence of Middagh Street’s domineering character, Wystan Auden, are everywhere. This applies to the biography of the librettist as well as ...”

“... aftermaths of soft September/Or under blanching mays.’ A year later, reviewing a life of Louis-Napoleon, he drily noted some inexact uses among ‘the daisies and dandelions of contemporary metaphor’: ‘I did not know that a storm could have an aftermath, nor that an aftermath could reach a throne.’ The unforgiving scholar and the poet who ...”