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“... be, if you were anything other than alone.’ Quoting his lines in a letter to his painter friend Roger Hilton, Graham added, typically: ‘OK OK a bit overblown speech, but it is approximately true, if I can say that.’He began to try, in the poems he wrote in the 1940s, to make the difficulty of communication the whole point, transmuting his defensive ...”

“... until after World War Two – was devastating. In the words of the Haitian anthropologist Jean Price-Mars, ‘the incompetence and frivolity of its leaders’ had ‘turned a country whose revenues and outflows had been balanced up to then into a nation burdened with debt and trapped in financial obligations that could never be satisfied.’ ‘Imposing an ...”

“... pay the bill, and help her out as best they can. Immigrants have offered to buy her house – at a price which the prospective landlord would be able to recover from his tenants in weeks, or at most a few months. She is becoming afraid to go out. Windows are broken. She finds excreta pushed through her letterbox. When she goes to the shops, she is followed by ...”

“... in Guildford. Then its particular interest was that the village scenes featuring the local doctor (Roger Livesey) had been shot at Shere, a picturesque hamlet below Newlands Corner where we’d sometimes go on walks. Livesey watches the goings-on in the village via a camera obscura, though why he does this isn’t explained or the workings of the device ...”

“... Albert Camus​ hated travelling. ‘Fear is the price of travel,’ he wrote in his journal of an unhappy trip through Central Europe in the summer of 1935, where he found himself gripped by ‘an instinctive desire to regain the shelter of old habits’. For Camus, who had tuberculosis, travel abroad raised the prospect not only of psychic unease but of illness: ‘We are feverish but porous ...”

“... actors). Intrigued by the piece, Maldoror convinced Genet to let Les Griots stage it and enlisted Roger Blin to direct. The production was sure to draw attention: Genet was already notorious for his lyrical novels about crime, prisons and homosexual love; Blin was a familiar face on French cinema screens and a theatre director with the first production of En ...”

“... Jenny. Diski feels more accurately like me, though it is an entirely invented name to which both Roger-the-Ex and I changed when we got married. There was a gasp and then a brief silence.‘How are you?’I was 11 when she had last known me, but what else was there to say?‘I’m well, thank you.’I explained that I was a writer these days and was thinking ...”

“... ask the one forbidden question, the renunciation of love for power, genital self-mutilation as the price of magic: Wagner’s work is everywhere preoccupied with boundaries set and overstepped, limits reached and exceeded. ‘Wagnerian’ has passed into our language as a byword for the exorbitant, the over-scaled and the interminable.Wagner has kept me awake ...”

“... collar. It’s a lovely thing, but what made George buy me it (and I don’t like to think of the price) is that it was made by Proust’s tailor. 18 April. A pre-operation session at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson wing of UCH down Huntley Street, in which Siobhan, a nice, cheerful and silly nurse, takes me through the same questionnaire I answered twice last ...”

“... his person were misleading. Monnet is a figure more out of the world of André Mal-raux than of Roger Martin du Gard. The small, dapper Charentais was an international adventurer on a grand scale, juggling finance and politics in a series of spectacular gambles that started with operations in war procurements and bank mergers, and ended with schemes for ...”

“... from someone who admired Pissarro enormously, and it points to something important. There is a price to be paid for lack of emphasis in art, for constant hushing and merging; and the gloaming of Le Champ de choux, we sense, is on the edge of tipping into indistinctness, indecisiveness. Many other paintings by Pissarro do tip. Art is obliged to run the risk ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... resurfaced between the wars with a semi-surrealist tint, in the theories of the sacred proposed by Roger Caillois and Georges Bataille at the Collège de Sociologie. In the late 20th century, this intellectual line has seen yet further avatars in the work of two of the most original thinkers of the left, at odds with every surrounding orthodoxy. In the early ...”

“... no less than the assumed and bogus Late Roman stoicism. A ‘terrific domino man’ indeed! What price ‘negative liberty’ now? And what of the sceptical humanist who warned incessantly about the sacrifice of living people to abstract ends, or totemic dogmas?As against all that, the pleadings of Alsop to Mac Bundy did succeed in getting the latter to ...”

“... down as the crowd went past the window of Chestertons, the estate agents, where the average house price was £3.6 million. ‘We want justice!’ ‘We want Paget-Brown!’ ‘Murderers!’ They got to the town hall and gathered round the entrance. ‘Get them out!’ they shouted, many of them with their phones raised. ‘This was murder by central and local ...”