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“... Indeed, Runcie had a Georgian disdain for enthusiastic displays of piety; he told his biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, that he ‘got more delight from lecturing on a Swan Hellenic cruise than … from going to some religious rally’. Despite the obvious differences in metaphysics and temper between the two archbishops and the zoologist, Williams and ...”

“... comedy at the outset of their careers: it’s only later that reality kicks in. When Humphrey Carpenter interviewed the leading lights of the 1960s satire boom for his book That Was Satire, That Was in the late 1990s, he found that what was once youthful enthusiasm had by now curdled into disillusionment. One by one, they expressed dismay at ...”

“... them up.’ And apparently he kept up the clowning when teaching in schools, where, according to Humphrey Carpenter in his biography of Auden, ‘one of his tricks was teaching the boys to stick stamps on the ceiling by flicking them up on pennies’; another trick was to pretend to cut off his penis. But for all that his ideas were impractical, and his ...”

“... is not visible to us – involves a decisive activity of belief. Cupitt is briefly mentioned in Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of Robert Runcie. Cupitt read theology at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, when Runcie was Dean of the college. According to Runcie, Cupitt raises theological questions more ‘acutely’ than an earlier liberal questioner, Bishop ...”

“... that. (I don’t want to beat this blond business to a bloody pulp but in his biography of Auden Humphrey Carpenter gives Kallman’s fancied companion as the poet Harold Norse. Norse thinks Auden was expecting him. The right blond and ready to be just as obliging as Kallman, Norse was a better bet all round. This is one of those moments when ...”

“... had come to be seen as a traitor by the US government. In 1988, 16 years after Pound’s death, Humphrey Carpenter called Chapter 3 of his thousand-page Life of Pound ‘Suburban Prejudice’, a phrase used by the elderly poet to describe anti-Semitism in a conversation with Allen Ginsberg. Carpenter quotes from an ...”

“... HarperCollins, which has published the Tolkien oeuvre since taking over Allen and Unwin in 1990. Humphrey Carpenter’s 1977 authorised biography and his 1981 edition of the Letters were also originally published by Allen and Unwin and are now with HarperCollins.I don’t want to defend Tolkien or to attack him, but to describe how the strange power of ...”

“... type of social organisation might not be valuable for man,’ Yerkes suggested. The story moves to Carpenter and Altmann, and what Haraway calls the semiotics of the naturalistic field. The first field studies of monkeys were done around the time of the Second World War. They concentrated on the study of dominance as the primary integrating mechanism of ...”

“... not even Nora Nicholson who played Sarita Myrtle and was with me in Forty Years On.13 January. Humphrey Carpenter comes round to do some fact-checking for his forthcoming book on satire and after. He asks me if we ever had any alternative titles to Beyond the Fringe, which was Robert Ponsonby’s contribution and not popular with us at the time. I ...”

“... the disappearance of a part of the landscape. 8 August. To the Cottesloe in the evening to talk to Humphrey Carpenter about his book That Was Satire That Was and answer questions from the audience. It goes well enough though I feel only slightly less inarticulate than I was in the period we are discussing. At one point ...”

“... It’s also another instance of ‘write it and it happens.’ Towards the end of The Habit of Art Humphrey Carpenter tells the ageing Auden and Britten that they have reached that stage in their lives when even their most devoted fans would be happy to close the book on them: no more poetry, no more music. Enough. It’s not the same but still, the ...”

“... Yard Gallery until 4 August; it will now be at the Tate from 11 September to 10 November. Humphrey Carpenter’s report on the exhibition for the TLS of 28 June will hardly choke the turnstiles. The show has, he said, ‘something of the air of a school reunion about it’, and with a few exceptions ‘it is the Pound business much as ...”

“... breviary of the cult of JFK, there appears the following vignette. Schlesinger had been asked to carpenter a ‘White Paper’ justifying Washington’s destabilisation of Cuba, in which the high-flown rhetoric of the New Frontier might form a sort of scab over the fouler business of empire. This task he readily performed, scampering back to the Oval Office ...”

“... diary captures the spirit of their gatherings: ‘To the Bird and Baby where I was joined by Humphrey, Tollers, and Chris. Tollers looking wonderfully improved by his restcure at Stonyhurst, and in great spirits (having packed his wife off to Brighton for ten days).’ It was from these meetings that Lewis’s children’s stories and Tolkien’s fantasy ...”