“... This is the first part of a two-part interview. Part 2: ‘The Price’.Ian Hamilton died of cancer on 27 December 2001, aged 63. It was a death that the ‘LRB’ has especial cause to lament. He was a great support to this paper, helping to get it going in 1979, serving ever since on its editorial board, and above all contributing many exact, unsparing and funny pieces on poetry, on novels – and on football ...”

“... resurfaced between the wars with a semi-surrealist tint, in the theories of the sacred proposed by Roger Caillois and Georges Bataille at the Collège de Sociologie. In the late 20th century, this intellectual line has seen yet further avatars in the work of two of the most original thinkers of the left, at odds with every surrounding orthodoxy. In the early ...”

“... no less than the assumed and bogus Late Roman stoicism. A ‘terrific domino man’ indeed! What price ‘negative liberty’ now? And what of the sceptical humanist who warned incessantly about the sacrifice of living people to abstract ends, or totemic dogmas?As against all that, the pleadings of Alsop to Mac Bundy did succeed in getting the latter to ...”

“... down as the crowd went past the window of Chestertons, the estate agents, where the average house price was £3.6 million. ‘We want justice!’ ‘We want Paget-Brown!’ ‘Murderers!’ They got to the town hall and gathered round the entrance. ‘Get them out!’ they shouted, many of them with their phones raised. ‘This was murder by central and local ...”