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“... comment. The almost simultaneous appearance of John Haffenden’s The Life of John Berryman and Eileen Simpson’s Poets in their Youth seems fortuitous. John Haffenden has already edited manuscripts of Berryman’s for posthumous publication (Henry’s Fate – Other Poems) and he is the author of John Berryman: A Critical Commentary, a guide through ...”

“... paranoia that would eventually engulf him. In her memoir, Poets in their Youth, his first wife, Eileen Simpson, has recorded many hair-raising episodes from this period, and told of her own gradual realisation that ‘no amount of love and care could protect him from external circumstances, and that these could bring him to the edge of madness’. On ...”

“... the man was becoming seriously unmoored. Married, happily it would seem, for five years to Eileen Mulligan (who 35 years later, as Eileen Simpson, now a psychologist, would write Poets in Their Youth, easily the most clear-eyed, intelligent and compassionate record of what it’s like to live with and among ...”

“... his criticism; Berryman he also admired, but with a keener edge of rivalry. (Berryman’s widow, Eileen Simpson, best catches the manner of their encounters and rivalries, in her memoir, Poets in Their Youth.) Delmore Schwartz, Roethke, Jarrell and Berryman were all self-consciously poètes maudits, and they all died before Lowell. So did his pupils ...”

“... by his brave wife, Cookie, who runs short of breath every time she hears the words ‘Wallis Simpson’. Everyone smokes, especially Princess Margaret, who smokes for the United Kingdom, plus Antigua and Barbuda – yet the smoke fails quite to obscure the devastations brought about by American divorcees, for whom, apparently, the thread of tradition is ...”

“... who from the first were eye-witnesses and servants of the Word.’ Memory was the issue for Mr Simpson. A former maths teacher at the school, he now suffers from Parkinson’s disease and he said he found it difficult to settle and remember things. Mr Simpson sat in a high-backed chair wearing purple pyjamas. His ...”

“... Archbishop Carey came to give her Communion and left her a bottle of olive oil which his wife Eileen had brought back from the Holy Land. Margaret was thrilled.All the harsher then that she should have been a victim of such strong-armed humbug by the combined forces of Church and State. But an even worse fate was in store for her. Anthony Armstrong-Jones ...”

“... of him persuading his mamma to come are pretty slim. John Gielgud was once telling me about Mrs Simpson and how smart she was. ‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘she’d have made a disastrous queen. Didn’t go to the theatre at all.’ 19 January. Alan Bates opens tonight at the Barbican in the RSC production of Antony and Cleopatra. The version put on at ...”