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“... The Di Castro Travel Agency in mid-town Alexandria has an eerily compelling window display: a shrine to the memory of Dodi al-Fayed and Diana, Princess of Wales. The shrine has as its centrepiece the front cover of the magazine al-Musawwar depicting Di and Dodi on their wedding day that never was. The couple are shown hand in hand: she in a white bridal gown, clutching a bouquet; he in a dark morning-suit with a carnation in his buttonhole ...”

“... company, and by me: Joseph Brodsky, Tom Paulin and, most intimately though I knew him least, Ian Hamilton. When I sent him a copy of my first book, I realised I’d even purloined his initials for my title. I wasn’t of an age to have been reading, never mind submitting to, his magazines, The Review and The New Review, but when I started publishing ...”

“... of card-carrying Arnoldians might have seemed rather daunting. As he tells us in his Preface, Ian Hamilton ‘several years ago ... had the idea of trying to write a full-scale biography of Matthew Arnold’. Since then the ambition has narrowed into something more purposive. His interest, Hamilton came to ...”

“... A man of many literary parts, Ian Hamilton came to biography late and triumphantly with his life of the dead but still warm Robert Lowell. Riding high, he went on to attempt an unauthorised life of the aged but very much alive J.D. Salinger and was comprehensively outfoxed by the second most reclusive man in American letters ...”

“... sadly not for very long, you could make your way to the Pillars of Hercules in Greek Street, where Ian Hamilton, editor of the New Review, was usually to be found. The suppliants, mostly young men not then long out of the universities, have very properly combined to congratulate the sage or gaffer on his 60th birthday.* Some of them got their first chance ...”

“... Writing​ to his friend Stephen Bann, then a graduate student, in 1964, Ian Hamilton Finlay outlined his plans to treat readers of his brash new journal, Poor. Old. Tired. Horse, to a free lollipop, sellotaped to the magazine’s cover. Like many of his plans from this period it came to nothing. In any case, sugar and spice weren’t really Finlay’s thing ...”

“... great man, however bashful, stumbling and dishevelled. It is the work of a tyrannicide subject, in Ian Hamilton’s words, to ‘tyrant delusions’. Lowell was a pacifist who was able, at moments, to praise the ideology of the master race. Mischievously mad or mischievously sane, it was hard to tell which, he once urged companions to exercise a sortes ...”

“... It is no coincidence, as the academics say, that what joins Karl Miller, now of the LRB, to Ian Hamilton, some time of the New Review, is a dominant, not to say overbearing, personality. Either man is able, by force of self-belief, to make good contributors expend, on an article, energy that they might otherwise have saved up to write ...”

“... he isn’t sober for the time it takes to get the thing down. Where you once had Kingsley Amis and Ian Hamilton, imbibing and describing for all they were worth, you now have young men who constantly pat their pockets, plead poverty, dodge their round and worry about their deadlines, in ways that would have made Dylan Thomas reach for some ancient bardic ...”

“... word for a change – wrong. Now consider a more sophisticated version of the Robinson technique. Ian Hamilton, noted biographer of Robert Lowell, writes to J.D. Salinger and informs him that he has become Hamilton’s latest subject: would the notoriously reclusive novelist mind answering some questions, could he take ...”

“... of optical illusion, as fantastic and artificial in its way as Ranelagh. ‘Certain gardens,’ Ian Hamilton Finlay has said, ‘are described as retreats when they are really attacks,’ and Miss Jekyll’s were attacks on the old Morrisian demons of ugliness and standardisation, but also on a world where country estates were getting smaller. Her ...”

“... in a wicker chair, checking a page in his typewriter. The picture appears on the covers both of Ian Hamilton’s Writers in Hollywood and of Tom Dardis’s Some Time in the Sun and instantly announces several elements of a familiar legend. Even in black and white the image is full of warm shadows, and the uncropped version fills out the legend a little ...”

“... the obituaries and of his conversations with Dan Jacobson in this paper will recall, cost the late Ian Hamilton much grief when he tried to quote them verbatim in his biography and was taken to court. Salinger wasn’t having any, and you have to wonder whether the old curmudgeon deserves even a backdoor tribute like ...”

“... his beloved Glass family. If he was, though, we’d surely have seen something of them by now.) Ian Hamilton, a friend of this paper, was interested in the life before Salinger’s great refusal, and set out to write a biography of those early years. In the course of his research he found a cache of letters that Salinger had written to friends, and had ...”

“... an insulting gesture of itself. Less successful, but interesting, is Gravestone, an excursion into Ian Hamilton Finlay territory in the form of a granite headstone inscribed with a banal shopping list, ‘bread, milk, cornflakes’ etc, in carefully cut and gilded letters. As a comment on the uneventful lives commemorated by standard issue slabs in ...”