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“... more dressing-gowns). Al Alvarez saw in her poems ‘a real talent of an edgy, bristling kind’; Ian Hamilton found ‘noise and vanity’.But before she gave it all up, and renounced poetry to live alone by the sea as a born-again Christian fundamentalist, there were also the novels. Six acid comedies of bad manners, at least as splenetic as the ...”

“... for membership, like Princess Margaret, who hated to miss out on a binge. According to Ian Board, after she left, Muriel quipped: ‘If they joined together all the cocks she’d had, they’d make a handrail across the Alps.’ Most of the habitués were loners, fighting for life, or fighting against it. ‘It wasn’t done,’ Elizabeth Smart ...”

“... Mr Reading, FUCK OFF. Yrs, The Plashy Fen School.’ But they don’t. Like the independent Ian Hamilton Finlay, and like Geoffrey Hill, to whom the early Reading of such phrasing as ‘congregations/are still here mulched into the cider orchard’ pays his dues, this is a poet who likes to investigate the strains and alliances between violence and ...”

“... about military command. In particular, it expresses dissatisfaction at the performance of Sir Ian Hamilton, the overall commander, on grounds both of over-optimism and a failure to press home demands for reinforcements of men and weapons. But these comments hardly tackle the crucial issue. Was the action doomed from the start, or was it a hopeful ...”

“... childhood, of his own family stories (‘autobiography re-experienced as fairytale’, as Ian Hamilton put it). The exaggerations and magical touches are rooted in the characters and the story. Shame (1983), a savage satire about Pakistan, is a less personal and less peopled work, with a clear political message at its heart. But both, although ...”

“... scratched his back, he was under no obligation to scratch yours: Edwin Morgan, Robert Garioch and Ian Hamilton Finlay are three Scottish poets whose work he dismisses where he might have been expected, if only for tactical reasons, to approve it. It is the same with Scottish literature of the past. MacDiarmid is almost alone among its formal and informal ...”

“... a universal consciousness from the diurnal torments of poverty, insecurity and mindless routine. Ian Hamilton Finlay’s landscapes of revolution, Edwin Morgan’s unabashed Modernism and internationalism, Sorley MacLean’s simultaneous fight for his language and for a humanist socialism. It’s not so much a matter of individual writers – and these ...”

“... no longer deny the evidence of his senses. ‘My God!’ he cried. ‘The hero is a bee!’ As Ian Hamilton tells it in Writers in Hollywood, Maeterlinck was sent packing, despite his attempt to improve his output by watching movies for the first time. The hero of The Hive is not a bee; it is beedom, the generality of bees – or commune, or ...”

“... Ian​ Hamilton once recounted in the LRB (22 October 1992) that ‘when William F. Buckley Jr sent a copy of his essays to Norman Mailer, he pencilled a welcoming “Hi, Norman!” in the index, next to Mailer’s name.’ The index discloses a lot about the nature of a book, and the passions of its author, more than is sometimes realised (‘acknowledgments’ are similarly illuminating ...”

“... Henry Woodd Nevinson is one of my heroes, the sort of person I dream of being. The champion crusader of Edwardian journalism, he filed pro-Revolutionary articles from Russia in 1905, and pro-Nationalist pieces from India. He won an exhausting battle to expose forced labour on the cocoa plantations of Portuguese Angola. Celebrated as a war correspondent, he started off wanting to fight, and picked up his pen only when he couldn’t persuade his Radical friends to join him in setting up a legion of volunteers to help Greece in its war against Turkey ...”

“... asserting that he was the victim of a London faggot literary coterie, consisting of Martin Amis, Ian Hamilton and myself. (Amis and I contemplated a letter to the Face, saying that this was very unfair to Ian Hamilton, but then dumped the idea.) Now here is Mailer attempting the near-impossible: that is to say, a ...”

“... She was also conscious of her origins and never let go of being Lady Caroline. According to Ian Hamilton, ‘she had a kind of aristocratic sense of entitlement and was capable of great vindictiveness when she didn’t get what she wanted.’ Not only was she beautiful, smart and a Lady, but she could fund the arts – or at any rate her chosen ...”

“... girl on the cover, but the magazine is actually quite gay, at least in the sense that the late Ian Hamilton used the term. Hamilton thought it was gay to look left and right when you crossed the road, and he thought it was gay for men to blow-dry their hair. This went on for a while until one day he made the point ...”

“... in time for the general election that it does not even have an index. Another rat, the lobbyist Ian Greer, hasn’t even got that far. His book, One Man’s Word: The Untold Story of the Cash for Questions Affair will not be published until the week before polling day. If the serialised extracts in the Daily Telegraph are anything to go by, Greer’s ...”

“... when there were plenty of people to stand by their woman. Those who wrote about her included Ian Gilmour, W.G. Runciman, Neal Ascherson, Christopher Hitchens, R.W. Johnson, Ross McKibbin, E.P. Thompson, Tam Dalyell and Peter Clarke. What they wrote seemed excellent to me, with Runciman bearing the palm for aphoristic conciseness. In embarking on a ...”