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“... Roy Campbell has been dead for twenty-five years, and in that time his reputation, such as it was, has faded almost entirely away (I can quote only one of his poems from memory – the epigram on South African novelists that ends ‘But where’s the bloody horse?’). Campbell is one now of that large, sad category, the Neglected Poets, along with many whom, in his day, he despised: Humbert Wolfe, for example, and Vita Sackville-West and Edward Shanks ...”

“... The first volume of Hardy’s letters, published two years ago, covered the three decades from 1862, when at 22 he set off for London to work as an architect, to 1892, the year after the publication of Tess. The story that those earlier letters tell is mainly the story of a career: how Hardy cast off architecture and took up novel-writing; how by 1884 he had earned enough from his books to build himself a substantial house near Dorchester; how a few years later he could also afford a flat in London for the ‘season’; how in London he entered both the world of letters and the world of Society, lunched with Browning and dined with Matthew Arnold, and visited Lord This and Lady That and the Honourable Whatshisname ...”

“... One doesn’t ordinarily expect a son to be a trustworthy recorder of his father’s life: if he isn’t paying off the old gentleman for remembered slights, like Shakespeare’s Edmund, he’ll be praising him for unremembered virtues, like Hamlet. So the first thing to be said about Sean Day-Lewis’s biography of his father is that he is neither an Edmund nor a Hamlet ...”

“... In ‘The Cave of Making’, his elegy for MacNeice, Auden describes his friend as a ‘lover of women and Donegal’. The geography seems a bit wrong – the Irish counties in MacNeice’s heart were surely Antrim and Galway – but the terms are apt enough for the man in the poems: a lover, certainly, and of both women and the land of his birth. A full list of his loves would have to be longer than Auden’s, though ...”

“... George Orwell was one of the great self-mythologisers. He sought out extreme experiences, was a policeman in Burma and a pauper in Paris and London, lived among unemployed workers in the North of England and among soldiers in Spain, and then turned those hard adventures into fables of imperialism, poverty and war. Everything that he wrote has the feel of direct experience, as though the books composed one long autobiography: yet everything is transformed, moulded into meaning, by his fierce moral sense ...”

“... Wyndham Lewis had a phrase for himself and those of his contemporaries whom he considered worthy of his company: he called them ‘The Men of 1914’. The phrase has a nice martial ring, and it is not surprising that critics have taken it up: but it implies a historical point that one simply can’t make. 1914 was the year the war started: but it didn’t start then for any of Lewis’s ‘Men ...”

“... names in American headlines, having shot down 12 German planes apiece. The Unsubstantial Air by Samuel Hynes is a chronicle of American pilots in the war, some who fought early on but the far greater numbers who joined the flying force, then called the Air Service. The first Americans to fly in the war had gone to France as volunteers in the American ...”

“... He seems to have believed that simply by worrying you did good. It was well said of him by Samuel Hynes, in The Edwardian Turn of Mind, that ‘when he brought injustice into a story, he did so in a way that was neither objective nor didactic but simply emotional; and his motive in doing so was not the alleviation of injustice but the alleviation ...”

“... rather an incentive, than a preventive, of war.’ If we assume this to be so, we might feel that Samuel Hynes, in completing his trilogy (the one which begins with The Edwardian Turn of Mind and ends with The Auden Generation – it was not originally planned as a trilogy), had a rather special problem on his hands. For in his approach, the calendar is ...”

“... Poems of the Past and Present and Time’s Laughingstocks), and found no mention by the editor Samuel Hynes of James Gibson’s traverse of just the same ground only three years before. The only difference I can find is that two private collectors, Frederick B. Adams and Richard Little Purdy, have extended to ...”

“... poetry, one letter states, that his ‘self-expression had been quite unfettered’. Volume III of Samuel Hynes’s edition contains his last two books, Human Shows and Winter-Words, written in his Sophoclean eighties, and a host of uncollected poems. He isn’t a poet who needs much annotation, but as in the previous volumes, ...”

“... for return to combat, but it gives no impression of dwelling on or summoning up the past, and Hynes in his own way writes as compellingly as Hillary did. What chiefly emerges – and is so unlike the earlier war – is the sense of modern conflict as a series of random industrial or natural accidents, in which those involved can receive neither credit nor ...”

“... expose the decadent spirit sapping Britain’s strength’. It was the beginning, as Samuel Hynes has written, of ‘a home-front war against sex, and especially what one might call dissenting sex – that is, homosexuality’. In Billing the reactionaries had found their champion. The campaign gathered steam. Foremost among the ...”

“... Like Stephen Highwood, it was found to be ‘boringly old-fashioned and over-serious’. Even Samuel Hynes called it ‘arid, unimaginative and unreadable’. And Upward had trouble finding a publisher for the third section. The overall suggestion was that his laborious rephrasings of the Art v. Politics dilemmas of his youth had added nothing much ...”

“... it defeat her. Her voice, which she found so early, is that of an elder sister, not the youngest. Samuel Hynes has even called it ‘episcopal’ – ‘praising the righteous, condemning heretics, explaining doctrine’. She found it easy to attract, almost as easy to dominate, and ‘if people do not have the face of the age set clear before them, they ...”