“... beStill the indomitable Irishry.Yeats died on 28 January 1939. Two days earlier, W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood had arrived in New York. When Auden heard of Yeats’s death, he sought to ascertain what time of the day or night he had died. He was planning a poem. What preoccupied him most in 1939 was guilt that his gift for poetry was serving ...”

“... TV series in the 1970s, with Anthony Valentine as a notably suave and sinister Raffles and Christopher Strauli as a frightened Bunny. The combination of mannered elegance and genuine nervous tension never fails.Ernest William Hornung, always known as Willie, was born in Middlesbrough in 1866, the youngest of eight children of a coal merchant from ...”

“... man’. Most Shakespeareans remain utterly unpersuaded by any of this, and the letters printed by Christopher Reid in his excellent 2007 collection show that Hughes was both wounded and unsurprised by the professional response: ‘What a pity the Times didn’t give my book to somebody who wasn’t straitjacketed inside the English Tripos,’ he wrote to the ...”

“... years to have been encased behind a great mask, from which he would only occasionally peep out: Matthew Spender recalled ‘a direct, blue-eyed stare’ lasting two seconds, ‘then he’d pull back within his usual frontiers, as if he’d corroborated some long-held suspicion’. The change could be disturbing for old acquaintances. Margaret Gardiner, who ...”

“... letters would enshrine his reputation; an edition of those was released in 2008, edited by Christopher Reid. I am not sure this enshrinement has come to pass. His reputation still rests on the phrase ‘sudden sharp hot stink of fox’, and Birthday Letters, read at a distance of 27 years, contains too much careful positioning to really count as ...”

“... together and are buried together.’ Nura had her books with her for her exams. Her chemistry, her Matthew Arnold, all of it going with her, as ‘the moon lies fair/Upon the straits’.Many of the Muslim women I spoke to weren’t keen on retribution. Most of them had no interest in apportioning blame or fighting over compensation. ‘It is all in the hands ...”