“... Young Men and what was then christened the Leftover Left, respectively – are seen as milestones. Ian Hamilton is referred to for his feat as a schoolboy editor in persuading celebrated writers to contribute to his magazine. His afterlife came later as afterlives do, and is missing from the book. So are Muriel Spark, V.S. Naipaul, and the explosive ...”

“... counts is staying power, and this he has in spades. A.P. Herbert, the Punch contributor chosen by Ian Hamilton to represent the ‘something-about-next-to-nothing school’ in the Penguin Book of 20th-Century Essays, could just about manage three pages on bathrooms. De Botton sustains his thoughts ‘On the Country and the City’ for an astonishing 25 ...”

“... of Gallipoli? He would probably not have indulged in the disastrous hesitations that doomed Sir Ian Hamilton. We can be quite sure that he would not have sacrificed military efficiency to good manners as that much more charming and likable General did. And he might well have succeeded, where Hamilton critically ...”

“... you can spot traces of the dominant period voices one after another – Gunn, Kees, Plath, Larkin, Hamilton, Lowell, Muldoon, Reid – and yet overall he seems relatively unchanging and almost wholly free from external influence. There is probably no quality as antithetical to him as literary pretension – I can’t imagine him using an allusion, let alone ...”

“... it points to the real vacuum in the publishing world of things to say about poetry itself. Inside Ian Hamilton’s volume there are, of course, things said, and they are said by experts – though the expertise is compartmentalised, with women writing about women, Indians about Indians, Irish about Irish, Scots about Scots, language-poet critics about ...”

“... Of British poets, apart from Bunting, Montgomery published four collections by Roy Fisher, one by Ian Hamilton Finlay, David Jones’s The Tribune’s Visitation, an early collection by Christopher Middleton, and three by Lee Harwood. The publishing provenance of an outsider poet like Harwood can tell you a lot about his work: Fulcrum, Oasis Books, Pig ...”

“... than they do now, from my accursed temper and moodiness.’ Even so, it might be true of him, as Ian Hamilton wrote of Robert Frost, that ‘he knew his own failings, knew what the world would think of him if it found out, and yet believed the world was wrong.’ In this short selection of Edward Thomas’s letters George Thomas has aimed, he says, at ...”

“... a need to publicise. In Keepers of the Flame: Literary Estates and the Rise of Biography (1992), Ian Hamilton quotes Brooke’s Rugby and Cambridge friend Geoffrey Keynes on the underlying causes of the Eddie-Ranee stand-off: Brooke’s unmanly physical beauty was often taken as an indication that he was probably a homosexual … It had, of ...”

“... Berlin described him as ‘disarmingly innocent’; but not everyone was disarmed. Ian Hamilton – whom Spender called ‘a professional hatchet man’ – once wrote a peppery though not wholly unsympathetic piece for the New Yorker in which he diagnosed in Spender a wily habit of getting in first to name his shortcomings so as to disarm ...”

“... thee ‘The upland vale, the far ocean, and – dividing them – the noisome realm of duty,’ Ian Hamilton notes in his account of Matthew Arnold in A Gift Imprisoned (1998): ‘Here was a map of life that centred on the middle ground, the in-between.’ There would have been no modern biography of Thomas Arnold the younger, had it not been for ...”

“... In his introduction to Against Oblivion, a selection of the work of 50 20th-century poets, Ian Hamilton quoted from Justice’s essay, in particular the section about the ‘mysterious and hidden consciousness within the artist of being other’, and asked: ‘What do we feel on reading this? Do we feel sorry for Justice, that he should be saddled ...”

“... understand what he was talking about.’ Meyers gives the lovers more room to breathe than Ian Hamilton did in his insightful 1982 biography, but in treating them as a group (six of the nine are huddled in a single chapter, subdivided by Roman numerals) he reinforces the impression of sameness. Just as the quartet of male poets in Manic Power were ...”

“... newspapers and journals (the line of influential poetry reviewing stretches from Edward Thomas to Ian Hamilton). Sooner or later, the taste which innovating literary journalists shape and enforce seeps through to institutions of higher education, which then disseminate it to their students, many of whom transmit it to the next generation of ...”

“... the early 1960s. It must have seemed strange to read the poetry of Pound, Williams, Robert Duncan, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Robert Creeley and Louis Zukofsky in a right-wing political journal. ‘Don’t worry about the Birch boys,’ Kenner wrote to Davenport in 1961, trying to persuade him to contribute to the magazine, ‘Buckley some time ago issued a ...”

“... face’. Are we to applaud these venture capitalists for their enterprise, or reflect that Ian McEwan’s prediction in his novel The Child in Time has come true, and Mrs Thatcher has finally introduced official begging to this country? But the small ad which surprised – no, shocked, enraged – me, ran as follows: ‘Creative writer aware of ...”