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“... which I happen to co-edit), has an interest in the writers he mentions, if only because Ian Hamilton said so in the pages of the London Review. He forgets (he is not very careful about these matters) that it was in the letters pages of this journal that The Night-markets was described as having nothing ‘remotely Poundian or ...”

“... with an answering machine. Grylls was hooked at once. He recommended the legendary lobbyist Ian Greer, who was approached by the hoaxers and, like Grylls, immediately hoodwinked. Lured to the bogus Park Lane offices Greer and his associates were filmed as they boasted about their powerful contacts in the Tory Party and the Government. Greer even ...”

“... Sir James Melville with the poet’s own experience of motherhood: the pay-off is too much like an Ian Hamilton poem (arms damp with flowers ‘from holding them so long’), but the narrative leaps and elisions make this a powerful poem about mothers and sons. There are some entertaining pieces about sex, too, one describing a wicked old neighbour at the ...”

“... to those who know nothing else about its author and to some who don’t usually read poetry. Ian Hamilton edited a selection of Lewis’s work, and there is a good biography by John Pikoulis. But his achievement has been hard to focus on. He moved quickly as a poet, and the poetry he wrote while on home service is markedly different from that ...”

“... The abject surrender of Neil Hamilton, the ‘envelope man’ who changed the law so that he could sue the Guardian for libel, deprived the nation of an exhilarating and informative court case. When the Guardian alleged that Hamilton, Tory MP for Tatton, had taken money from Mohammed AI Fayed, chairman of Harrods to lobby Parliament against a Department of Trade inquiry which eventually denounced Fayed as a liar, the cocky MP announced that he was at last going to get even with the liberal press ...”

“... the newly-published Collected Poems of Larkin, recently reviewed in this journal (13 October) by Ian Hamilton, to make plain the critical shortcomings of this approach. As Hamilton pointed out, the collection can at first take a reader aback. Most of the 80 new poems drawn from notebooks and added by the ...”

“... you, and nor did the LRB, though it smelled better. One of the most distinguished contributors was Ian Hamilton. Writing about literary marriages, he says somewhere that their frequent break-up can be put down to the wives being ‘insufficiently worshipful’. I felt that about the LRB. Hamilton himself was quite stern ...”

“... the stories of literary camaraderie or infighting. Ballard must have his reasons for dismissing Ian Hamilton, without deigning to name him, as a ‘self-important Soho idler’ who didn’t deserve Arts Council funding for the New Review, but the book would be more attractive without such spasms of sourness.) Ballard describes himself as an ...”

“... are combative on this point, and so united that they frequently refer to themselves as ‘Jack&Ian’. To this winsome dyad the notion of astrobiology is limiting in that it stands for astronomy as seen from Earth plus Earth-style biology, so that its thinking is governed by anthropic concerns such as the search for ‘habitable zones’ elsewhere in our ...”

“... is said to have asked; and being funny is obviously an important element in the iconoclasm. When Ian Hamilton asked him to reflect on the contemporary poetry scene in 1972 for the Review, Carey duly noted some positives but also expressed some regrets, namely the recent deaths of Plath and Roethke ‘and the award of the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry ...”

“... his time there. By contrast, the reclusive Salinger has given traces abundant enough to let Ian Hamilton plan a biography; and while Hawthorne, who had troubles with Pynchon’s Calvinist ancestors for his characterisation in The House of the Seven Gables of Judge Pyncheon, is famously credited with 12 years of deep isolation in his family home in ...”

“... Her Friends, in which she observed that her subject would always be an outsider. Twenty years ago Ian Hamilton wrote that Mew’s reputation ‘hangs by a thread’. Her Collected Poems and Prose has long been out of print and there are no critical books devoted to her writing.I’m not sure she would have minded. Reading essays that seek to rehabilitate ...”

“... is shining now. I must have lunch – found a big slug in my lettuce recently!In an interview with Ian Hamilton in 1964 Larkin expressed annoyance with reviewers of his work who complained that there was something ‘uniquely dreary’ about the experiences depicted in his poems. ‘I’d like to know how all these romantic reviewers spend their time ...”

“... pinched from Westminster and returned to Scotland by a young nationalist writer and singer called Ian Hamilton. Another opportunity arose not long afterwards, when the Post Office announced that the logogram EIIR would in future appear on all postboxes. Henderson was at a meeting held in Sorley MacLean’s flat to discuss how Scotland might respond. He ...”

“... This is the first part of a two-part interview. Part 2: ‘The Price’.Ian Hamilton died of cancer on 27 December 2001, aged 63. It was a death that the ‘LRB’ has especial cause to lament. He was a great support to this paper, helping to get it going in 1979, serving ever since on its editorial board, and above all contributing many exact, unsparing and funny pieces on poetry, on novels – and on football ...”