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“... Auden​ loved aphorisms, extracts, notes, lists. It was not just the shortness of short forms that he approved of: he liked their refusal of system even more, their acknowledgment that fragmentariness can only ever be papered over, never wholly subsumed. The nearest he came to publishing an autobiography, which was not very near at all, was A Certain World (1970), a commonplace book made up of his favourite quotations, arranged alphabetically under rough and ready, almost arbitrary headings, with only occasional passages of explanation or commentary ...”

“... W.H. Auden’s first published book review appeared in the Criterion in April 1930, and his first sentence cuts a dash: ‘Duality is one of the oldest of our concepts; it appears and reappears in every religion, metaphysic and code of ethics; it is reflected in (or perhaps reflects) the earliest social system of which we have knowledge – the Dual Organisation in Ancient Egypt; one of its most important projections is war ...”

“... By the time Auden came to live in the Brewhouse, a cottage in the grounds of Christ Church, in 1972 I had long since left Oxford and in any case would never have had the nerve to speak to him. I’d first heard his voice in Exeter College hall some time in 1955. The lower end of the scholars’ table where I was sitting was only a yard or two from high table where the dons dined and, hearing those harsh, quacking tones without knowing whose they were, I said to my neighbour that it sounded like the voice of the devil ...”

“... and they are not all by Britten, for also included are letters by Peter Pears, Mrs Mayer, Auden and many others. The diaries, kept by the composer from 1928 to 1939, are used extensively but not, it seems, exhaustively, for we are given a half-promise that there will be a separate edition of them (though presumably Humphrey Carpenter’s imminent ...”

“... me out. Wordsworth is its presiding presence; his poetry is the bar before which other poets –Auden and Eliot, Hardy and Robert Lowell and Browning. Pound and, yes, Hill – are brought to judgment. This is not overt. Robinson can’t, any more than the rest of us, come on like a latter-day Leavis, a fearlessly normative critic; instead, psychologists and ...”

“... in execution. The tributary volume of memoirs, such as the one Stephen Spender compiled after Auden’s death, has the value not only of illuminating its subject but of providing a complex shading of reaction and relation through the personalities of the contributors. Alan Blyth has recorded reminiscences from 30 persons who knew Britten, and then ...”

“... teacher for much of his later life there is little critical writing and little reviewing. Unlike Auden or Spender he never hit the lecture circuit. His journals, where they survive, are unreliable. But, as Parker demonstrates, Isherwood is central to any consideration of the ‘Auden generation’: more so, perhaps, than ...”

“... When Auden announced in his preface to a new selection that Tennyson was ‘undoubtedly the stupidest’ of all the English poets he must have known that he was asking for trouble. Trouble duly came in the shape of Sir Desmond MacCarthy, who doggedly stood up in the Sunday Times for the quality of Tennyson’s mind, deplored Auden’s account of the great man as ‘very patronising’, then sought to out-patronise him in turn: ‘It reads as if Mr Auden had been feeling while he wrote it like a middle-aged schoolmaster preparing a report on little Alfred’s work and behaviour ...”

“... the approval of their audience. The first play, Sherlock Holmes chez Duhamel, was written by Mr Auden for performance by Form V. It was a representation of a visit of Sherlock Holmes to France, and showed the attitude of the French towards his methods of deduction.’ The report passes over the play in silence, preferring the scenes from The Wind in the ...”

“... Why? Why, for instance, was it necessary – let’s, for once, call a theft a theft – to rob Auden (not a millionaire himself) of his commissioning fee for The Rake? ‘I have not sold La Biennale anything but my conducting and musical supervision of the performance,’ Stravinsky tells him, ‘and most of your problems are off bounds to ...”

“... or cannot build castles. The natural rival of this Oxford Book is the Faber Book, compiled by W.H. Auden and Louis Kronenberger and first published in 1962. Auden was himself an aphorist (he is represented in Gross’s collection), and Kronenberger was a connoisseur of the form, so their book, which will take a bit of ...”

“... and thought of their time. It must have been in 1936 that I met him at the suggestion of W.H. Auden, the friend of a friend, in the pub in Charing Cross Road nearest to Soho Square. I have told the story often – Auden had written: ‘You want to get into film because you think it is the art of the future. It ...”

“... the editor has to turn to the much less reliable Howard Griffin (who also, in his turn, became Auden’s secretary) and to two other volunteers, women who had preserved their notes from the spring term.The result reads like a remarkably full account of what the poet said about Shakespeare but also about many other matters. At the time of the lectures he ...”

“... Although W.H. Auden, who ranks with Hugo von Hofmannsthal among the master librettists of the age, thought that the meaning of libretto’s words were its least important component (at any rate, so far as the audience is concerned), and that a libretto is ‘really a private letter to the composer’, he also found that ‘as an art-form involving words, opera is the last refuge of the High Style ...”

“... for the maker of ceramic pots I Dear Wystan Auden, as I lay last night     Unsleeping on a hard Youth Hostel bed, The windows pearly with the pale twilight     That glows on constantly up here instead     Of proper dark, a thought traversed my head: How fine if I could summon down from heaven The flax-haired you of Nineteen Thirty-Seven ...”