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“... spinster sisters did not weaken. Honan gives Mrs Austen a better hearing than some others, notably Geoffrey Grigson, have done: the hypochondria is recognised but it is balanced by much evidence of good humour and good sense. James’s Mary and Edward’s Elizabeth figure more fully than in most accounts, and emerge the worse for it. James’s ...”

“... the latter thanking him. ‘Fuck Wain and the prig in the Times who was probably Griggers’ – Geoffrey Grigson, another in his rogues’ gallery. ‘I’ve gone away to escape further blows.’ His publisher hoped to steer Betjeman back to architecture, but despite the rollcall of topics Murray reminded him that they had discussed ...”

“... and Neo-Romantic poetasters, mostly, with Edith Sitwell and Roy Campbell as potential allies, Geoffrey Grigson lurking threateningly in the wings and T.S. Eliot a very distant god. The former Muriel Camberg joined this cast in 1944 after a stint in southern Africa, where she’d ended a short marriage to the unstable if catchily named Sydney ...”

“... November 1937 Auden special issue of New Verse (where he was working as an editorial assistant to Geoffrey Grigson, and where most of his own early work appeared) implies that as the 1930s progressed Spencer slowly came to realise that Auden was not the charismatic leader whose example he should follow, but his poetic antithesis: ‘He succeeds,’ the ...”

“... early poems gave me enormous trouble when I was an undergraduate. Confident teachers spoke of Geoffrey Grigson’s advice to Thirties poets to ‘report well. Begin with objects and events.’ These poets were socially concerned, we were told; they were tempted by Communism, wanted to open some negotiation with popular culture, and to include the ...”

“... wanted his readers to cry out with ‘ahs’ and ‘ohs’ as they reached for their dictionaries. Geoffrey Grigson, in a review that Burgess seems to have learned by heart, said that his journalism was driven by a desire to convince himself that ‘an insatiable liking for words amounts to an ability to use them well and to distinct purpose.’ The ...”

“... Many of her critics used the misogynistic vocabulary of frigidity against both her and her work, Geoffrey Grigson being particularly obnoxious in attacking the imagery in her poems as such as ‘could only have been contrived by a poet who had never experienced pregnancy’. To Harold Acton she was ‘the essential hysterical intellectual ...”

“... the skimpy wine, & the very nice sensible conversation’ left Virginia Woolf cold but where, as Geoffrey Grigson remembered, one might bump into Braque … or Jean Hélion from Paris, or Eliot gayer than his reputation, actually singing ‘Frankie and Johnny’. The exodus from Hitler’s Reich having begun, one might walk into the solemn dignified ...”

“... those works which become an old favourite while still brand new. And finally, America adored him. Geoffrey Grigson, an early supporter and subsequently an astringent critic, thought Thomas appealed especially to ‘persons of a kind needing shots of the notion of art as others need shots of insulin, of a kind put on heat by the slightest contact with ...”

“... the poet. 21 October. Find in the bookshelf a copy of The Private Art: A Poetry Notebook by Geoffrey Grigson, which I must have read years ago and forgotten. Tipped in, as booksellers say, is a letter from a woman about Louis MacNeice, on whom I’d done a TV programme and who was a friend of Grigson’s. She had ...”

“... with no line left with which to haul themselves off. Neither Getting On nor Habeas Corpus is what Geoffrey Grigson called ‘weeded of impermanence’ – a necessary condition, apparently, if a play or a poem is to outlast its time. Topical references are out. Of course, plays don’t become timeless simply by being weeded of timely references, any more ...”

“... that led people to misuse it. When the Radio Times announced a series of broadcast talks by Geoffrey Grigson on the novel, Leavis, in great agitation, tried to have them stopped, on the ground that they would certainly plagiarise The Great Tradition. He was indignant and suspicious when he heard that Graham Hough was writing a book on ...”

“... when the spirit of parody is only uncertainly abroad. And it works the other way around too, as Geoffrey Grigson pointed out in the excellent Choice of Southey’s Verse that he made for Faber in 1970 (long overdue for a reprint). Grigson was a fine critic, as well as an anthologist of genius, and his introductory ...”

“... the sovereign centres. Throughout the 1930s, Day-Lewis’s work attracted the usual venom from Geoffrey Grigson and the usual unsparing criticism from F.R. Leavis, but his consecration in the eyes of a wider public had come with T.E. Lawrence’s judgment in conversation with Winston Churchill, as reported in the Evening Standard in 1934, that ...”

“... by Christopher Caudwell, the zoo as a place where Stephen Spender thought it worth telling Geoffrey Grigson he had spent an enjoyable Saturday with a friend in 1934. Lists of this kind fill 13 chapters, crowded, fascinating, obsessive, with some important themes like spies and borders turning up in two or three different places. No subject is too ...”