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“... go to the Slade, as John had done. There he knocked around with Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler and Edward Wadsworth in the Slade Coster Gang. They went to music halls, held parties with naked dancing girls and got into fights on Tottenham Court Road. It was a remarkable time at the Slade – his other classmates included Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson, David Bomberg ...”

“... art and popular taste (Quentin Bell), the evolution of the English landscape (Richard Muir) – are excellent and briskly-written popularising surveys. But the whole enterprise, I do think, is compromised by those gestures towards ‘the English Spirit’, ‘the making of a tradition’ etc. (They come thickest, it is true, in the unsigned ...”

“... and remembered the book disparagingly in the introductory chapter of Aspects of the Novel. Edwin Muir’s Structure of the Novel (1928) came just too late for him, and indeed shows an acquaintance with Aspects. Muir shared his enthusiasm for Proust, saying that Proust had written a novel resembling Gide’s in that it was ...”

“... it. Nowhere is it more difficult to observe than in the matter of Robert Burns. Long ago, Edwin Muir said that ‘for a Scotsman to see Burns simply as a poet is almost impossible.’ Robert Crawford, himself an admired and graceful poet, writes on the closing page of The Bard that ‘Burns’s poetry carries so much of its maker with it that it seems to ...”

“... true that Keith Douglas was always conscious of Isaac Rosenberg behind his shoulder, Alun Lewis of Edward Thomas. But the idea of modern warfare as one thing and of poetic response to it as another seems, in retrospect, almost Churchillian in its fixedness. Back then, although we loved the old rogue for the rodomontade and sheer cheek of his rhetoric, we got ...”

“... been so keen to be a Hugh not a Christopher, and a MacDiarmid not a Grieve.MILLER: It was Edwin Muir’s great joke about MacDiarmid’s acolytes. ‘Men of sorrow and acquainted with Grieve.’Lichen covered the wet stone. We went inside the church and signed the book. The place seemed recently abandoned. A Bible was open on an oak table and dead flowers ...”