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“... all talking about the same house in a backstreet in Chania. Each of them had given the painter John Craxton a lump sum to repair it, in exchange for a half share in the ownership. None of them minded the imposture, which had been going on for about twenty years, and they all remained friends with Craxton, which says something about his character. His ...”

“... early poems, sometimes converting them to an inappropriate modern harshness; nobody seems to like John Crowe Ransom’s reworkings; and Auden’s revisions and exclusions sometimes seem petulant or even perverse, as if he had decided not to understand his own poems. Since the original versions remain accessible this is not a matter of high ...”

“... Rosamond Lehmann was born the day after Queen Victoria’s funeral. When the First World War broke out she was 13, on holiday with her family on the Isle of Wight. The imminence of hostilities had put an end to a plan, much dreaded by Rosamond, to send her and her sister to stay with relatives in Germany. From her own point of view the war was ‘a personal and miraculous reprieve’: ‘of the world crisis, I remember only that sudden emptiness of the beach and the expression on my father’s face as he sat reading the papers all day ...”

“... or even fifteen-minute pick-ups, none likely to have any emotional content. As he had told John Lehmann, “I freely admit to having no romantic notions about trade.”’ ‘Their residence in Paris in spring 1965 made clear to both Howard and Gore how much more they preferred Rome. Nightlife and cruising were easier, more casual there, and there ...”

“... Romanian, Bulgarian, Hungarian and Russian peasants. Even among ourselves the Australian poet John Manifold, also an ex-service linguist and ballad collector, would, like Hamish, return to his homeland and there collect and contribute to a tradition (his work was performed and published as Bandicoot Ballads). Our optimism was immense. After all, we ...”

“... with rows of folding chairs and a simple table … Nikos told me later that the critic and editor John Gross, in the audience, seemed to be scowling at my presuming to speak about Sonia. Then Mary McCarthy spoke, her rectangular smile held rectangular and exposing her teeth as she spoke, and what she said about Sonia didn’t seem complimentary, except her ...”

“... and shortly afterwards he did. Spender told the story of this first interview over and over again: John Sutherland, his biographer, calculates that he repeated it at least six times in print and uncountable times in lectures and talks and interviews, as well as in conversation. Spender would come to resent Auden’s tendency always to think of him as he had ...”

“... effective, it’s true, but not particularly clandestine either (the journalist and historian John Prebble’s experience was identical); and by June 1944 large parts of the Army had developed from an anti-Fascism more consciously deliberated than ever Churchill’s was, through a famous browned-offness, to something like specifically socialist war ...”

“... a model for Hugh Moreland in A Dance to the Music of Time), William Walton, Dylan Thomas, Augustus John, Elisabeth Lutyens, John Lehmann, Louis Macneice, Alan Rawsthorne, Michael Ayrton. In the dark background are the diabolic Bernard Van Dieren and Philip Heseltine (‘Peter Warlock’), two men, composer-writers like ...”

“... one suspects, very much worse than death in the mind of the ageing Eurosceptic Tory. We know who John Gielgud was – the greatest English speaker of his generation, the lyre of English verse – but his letters tell a story of who he was underneath all that, or perhaps because of being all that. At 23, we find him writing to his mother from Newcastle about ...”

“... goes into the opulent restaurant there, and never leaves behind him less than 40 roubles.’ John Lehmann watched him giving ‘huge tips’ to the waiters. Edmund Wilson noted that he would ‘offset the bristling and slant-eyed mask appearance that recalled the Muscovite tsars by a giggle that suggested Edward Lear’. And in 1936 Vera ...”

“... sides. We are going to live in a garret.’) The forthcoming marriage occasioned a long letter to John Hilton, a schoolfriend who offered to intercede between MacNeice and his prospective in-laws, the Beazleys. It comes as a relief and a shock to read it. Here, at last, is the intimate voice: here goes: Apologia pro Vita Mea. Only not even an apologia. (You ...”

“... is how to write and it excites her to think of the flattering request by Christopher Isherwood and John Lehmann for a short story for New Writing. But a day or two earlier she had feelings she described as ‘fiction’, when she had a sudden urge to go to Paris and Leonard said he would rather not. ‘I was overcome with happiness ... after twenty-five ...”

“... then under Manuel Noriega (former friend of George Bush), is now firmly back in its control. (As John Major says in the Cambridge History, the Panama Canal has been the ‘outstanding symbol of Washington’s power to dominate the weaker states of the hemisphere’.) It still exercises direct colonial rule over Puerto Rico (an ‘unincorporated ...”

“... novelists: Bowen, Graham Greene, Henry Yorke (who wrote as Henry Green), Rose Macaulay, Rosamond Lehmann and the Austrian émigrée Hilde Spiel. The combination of danger and novelty made the times ‘an absolute gift to the writer’, as Yorke put it to Lehmann: ‘Everything is breaking up.’ Amid the physical and ...”