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“... have to hold my breath for fear of infecting the people who come near me.’ A view shared by David Gascoyne (with whom she was briefly in love, she nearly 40, he not yet 20), who wrote: ‘On the whole, I think her influence on the people she comes in contact with is bad ... There are very few who can stand the dazzling (but how depressing!) light of ...”

“... instant news and instant views. The former head of the Bureau of Intelligence Research, Thomas Hughes, concluded gloomily a decade ago that, in the struggle for policy-makers’ attention, the ‘bakers’ (long-term analysts) had been defeated by the ‘butchers’ (current intelligence specialists). Long-term analysis nowadays probably has greater ...”

“... roamed a bit, both geographically and poetically; travelled in the realms not only of Kavanagh and Hughes, but of Olson and Williams, Snyder and Bly. I was freed up,’ he says, much as Donald Davie was freed up by his own move to California. (Heaney praises Essex Poems, begun before Davie left Britain, but published, and perhaps completed, afterwards.) To ...”

“... and soldier, who has a Greek wife but misses Jean ‘damnably’; the ‘feckless’ Tommy Hughes – Irish, of course – a doctor and a communist; and ‘Mac’, the office philanderer, who has five girlfriends (three in Sheffield), a liaison that goes on for years. The ‘sex war’ is in full spate and Jean unbuttons: ‘I could have knifed ...”

“... slips aside, as when the Collector is musing amiably on the status of the ‘fallen woman’, Lucy Hughes, who had come out from England with ‘the fishing fleet’, to find a husband: ‘The war had taken such a toll of young men! Only in India was there still a plentiful supply to be found’. He is thinking, of course, of the Crimean War, but the effect is ...”

“... novelists (Hilary Mantel, Sarah Waters, Madeline Miller), classicists (Robin Lane Fox, Bettany Hughes), historians (Tom Holland), who salute her muscular resurrections of the classical world, and gay men who see her as a pioneer in her writing about homosexual relationships. Along with hundreds of other gay men, many of them closeted, the writer and ...”

“... Ailey and Katherine Dunham; the musicians Duke Ellington and Marion Williams; the writers Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka. Senghor’s friend Césaire made an appearance, as did the Barbadian writer George Lamming, the South African writer Keorapetse Kgositsile and singers and dance troupes from Brazil and Trinidad and Tobago. Despite his scepticism about ...”

“... first and last British soldiers to embark on her.The Esk’s rescue of the Scotia is well told by David Divine in The Nine Days of Dunkirk, first published in 1959. The ship had been hit ‘abaft the engine-room on the starboard side and on the poop deck, and in the final attack one bomb went down the after-funnel. Scotia was heavily damaged and began to sink ...”

“... on the prominence of ‘the morbid and the tragic’ in his own work, the Guyanese poet David Dabydeen once said that ‘the plantation experience had severe and traumatic psychic impacts … but overwhelmingly had to do with what is the very ground of our being, which is our body.’ This is an obvious reason slavery goes with revenge tragedy. The ...”

“... a trailer for Peter Jackson’s new Beatles documentary, Get Back; a new documentary about Mark David Chapman; an article trailed as ‘the inside story of how Bowie met John Lennon’; a lockdown viewing of the dreary Richard Curtis film Yesterday; a mystifying Japanese tweet, apparently about Ringo.And those are just the ones I remembered to jot ...”

“... interviews with neo-cons – on its website. It is an amazing piece. In it Adelman, Richard Perle, David Frum, all paid-up neo-cons, blame the following people for the Iraq disaster: George Tenet, General Tommy Franks, members of the National Security Council (‘not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were ...”

“... is the tree of life.’ Carey sometimes takes this line: it lies behind his admiration for Ted Hughes, for instance, whose poetry exposes ‘the fragility and misplaced pride of the human intellect’. But, as Stefan Collini has observed, what really gets under his skin is intellectuals being snobby and condescending, and in his impressively disgusted book ...”

“... of residence or identity and I’m sent home to get them.14 May. A piece in the Independent about David Blunkett tackling falling standards in education. I am pictured, though whether as evidence of decline or hope for the future I can’t make out. Either would please me.Judging from newspaper reports, the congregation at Ted ...”

“... And of songs: ‘David of the White Rock’, the ‘Summer Song’ so soft, and that Beautiful tune to which roguish words by Welsh pit boys Are sung – but never more beautiful than here under the ...”

“... eccentric or somewhat controversial deceased or elderly relatives than great poets-in-waiting. Ted Hughes already feels like a rumour. It’s as though the human reef of literature was not considering any more applications, or the escalator had ground to a halt. To say that anyone who cares about poetry should read Lowell is not enough. (Can it be that they ...”