“... hopes for an audience continent-wide. The poet and his or her reader are inhabitants of what W.H. Auden described in the introduction to his Faber Book of Modern American Verse as ‘a continent only partially settled and developed, where human activity seems a tiny thing in comparison to the magnitude of the earth’. In her more recent Faber Book of ...”

“... enthusiasm – admittedly, for the greater part delivered by personal friends such as W.H. Auden, who proposed marriage to Hannah Arendt shortly before his death. In the Sixties, Hannah Arendt was very Sixties. Her friends in America were of the Left – Philip Rahv, Mary McCarthy (her generous literary executor) and Dwight MacDonald – and she ...”

“... probably decide, as I did, that this is a necessary confusion. According to Deborah Baker, W.H. Auden thought of Riding as ‘our only philosophical poet’, but with this exception pretty well no one else who mattered ever took up her case. Baker’s Laura Riding is a strange, complex figure, mediated through many unfamiliar angles, as shattered and ...”

“... greatest friends, was the painter and poet David Jones, whose long poem In Parenthesis W.H. Auden was not alone in thinking the greatest book about the First World War. It emerged after long gestation. Ede, opening his copy when it arrived one morning in 1937, was at once moved to tears. The other artist who, as Ede put it, ‘bound’ his ...”

“... a waste of shame’. These must all be among the (at least) ‘49 outstanding poems’ which W.H. Auden finds among the Sonnets in his helpful introduction to the Signet edition. And it must be this kind of central, classic writing that made C.S. Lewis, in his Oxford history of non-dramatic 16th-century literature, speak of the Sonnets as not just the ...”

“... be praised in language less external. For van Doren, then, the Odes. Anthologising Dryden, W.H. Auden remarked appreciatively that left to himself he would have filled his whole book with Prologues and Epilogues. Or again, Keith Walker, in his Oxford Poetry Library selection, confines himself almost entirely (after Mac Flecknoe, parts of Absalom and ...”

“... music. There was quite a 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 ...”

“... them was not unconditional, it was also not unintelligent. She was much affected by something W.H. Auden had written – ‘To be wellbred means to have respect for the solitude of others, whether they be mere acquaintances or, and this is much more difficult, persons we love’ – and felt it applied to her relationship with Susan. ‘I do not see how I can ...”

“... surprises within oneself the church-going urge to be more serious. Alan Bennett’s piece on W.H. Auden, which seemed so good when it appeared in the paper, seems better still reprinted. For this, the justly famous Bennett can have got no royalties, no curtain calls, no green-rooms cries of ‘Darling!’ His reward was the special, monkish sense of release ...”

“... both the laws of writing and the laws of childhood: laws that must be taken seriously.It was W.H. Auden who said: ‘there are good books which are only for adults, because their comprehension presupposes adult experiences, but there are no good books which are only for children.’ The great discipline of children’s fiction is that it has to be written for ...”

“... Brierley, 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 ...”

“... following year Klaus, too, was declared stateless. In 1935, five days after her marriage to W.H. Auden, her second husband, Erika was also stripped of her citizenship. (Auden seemed to get infinite amusement from his relationship with the Manns. ‘What else are buggers for?’ he replied when asked why he had married the ...”

“... biographical sources for the power and originality of the poetry they found so mesmerising: W.H. Auden believed that Eliot had had a mystical vision when he was a young child, Hart Crane was convinced that he was secretly gay, while Delmore Schwartz was a fount of scurrilous stories about Eliot’s sex life, which, according to Schwartz, included a ...”

“... route from Nazi Europe. Inspired by the example of Erika Mann, who had recently married W.H. Auden, Maria approached the window cleaner of the Huxleys’ London pied à terre in Albany: ‘He was a British subject. She didn’t actually know from where, the West Indies probably, possibly from Africa … Aldous wasn’t quite certain he would do.’ The ...”

“... and American artists who gathered at her Sunday afternoon salon. Thomas Mann, Aldous Huxley, W.H. Auden, Sergei Eisenstein, Hanns Eisler, Arnold Schoenberg, Lionel Feuchtwanger, Franz Werfel and Bertolt Brecht rubbed shoulders with Peter Lorre, Charles Laughton, Orson Welles, Jean Renoir, Marlene Dietrich, Charlie Chaplin, Harpo Marx and many others. Brecht ...”