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“... Afghanistan emerged as an independent kingdom in the 18th century, though its frontiers would change many times and it would always be more a confederation of tribes and lesser khanates than a centralised state. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, determined to halt Russia’s Inner Asian advance and ‘secure’ its own North Indian frontier, Britain fought three wars with the Afghans ...”

“... McDonald has written (admiringly) of the ‘apparent fragility’ of the poems, and the critic John Lyon argued that ‘precariousness is a precondition of Longley’s art.’ Longley, who was all too familiar with protracted writer’s block, often spoke of precariousness in the sense that a poem might come but then again it might not. ‘I live from poem ...”