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“... listen to and watch each other constantly, aware that out of such mutual perception poems form. Geoffrey Lehmann’s Spring Forest is another family book produced through double-voicing. As Lehmann explains at the start, ‘this book is spoken through the voice of a living person, Ross McInerney of Spring ...”

“... Geoffrey Grigson and I were touring Wiltshire in a hired car, a black Morris 1000 saloon, doing a piece of photo-journalism for Picture Post. I was taking the photographs. It-was 1951. The Mail had offered a reward of £10,000 for any information leading to the capture of the fleeing diplomats, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean ...”

“... of literary skill’. (Once celebrated as the Shelley of the Thirties, he was later described by Geoffrey Grigson as the ‘Rupert Brooke of the Depression’.) Isherwood, he grudgingly conceded, could claim ‘accomplishment’. Isherwood returned the tepid compliment, 12 years later, with a script for the Tony Richardson production of The Loved One. The ...”

“... 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 Day-Lewis ...”

“... who’d spent years carefully tracking and tracing the continuities between Hardy and Larkin and Geoffrey Hill, say, and producing learned monographs on the Movement or on Ted Hughes suddenly took the notion to write a book about Frederic Prokosch (a poet, like Day Lewis, who made most of his money from novels), or Archibald MacLeish (again, like Day ...”

“... riding-masters, and therefore is afflicted by rentier-guilt. (‘Recurrent as malaria,’ John Lehmann wrote in 1955, ‘a bout of rentier-guilt laid me low.’) Because Auden’s ideal or preferred or postulated reader has this socio-political identity, he is particularly easy to recognise; Trotter’s ingenuity and sensitivity are more taxed when dealing ...”

“... retarded the separation of English poetry from its general English audience. To a sharp eye – to Geoffrey Grigson’s, for instance – the burial of the private Day-Lewis was already in progress in the Thirties, when the avant-garde poet became also Nicholas Blake the detective novelist, and Day-Lewis the Communist joined the selection committee of the Book ...”

“... youth, and a tragic precursor for the other three young officers she loved – Victor Richardson, Geoffrey Thurlow and her younger brother, Edward, all killed in action. When one reads Brittain’s diary, it is hard not to resent the way Leighton cut across the natural line of her development. In the early entries, despite some priggishness and superior ...”

“... frankness seems almost deliberately self-lacerating,’ Julian Symons wrote. John Lehmann said he was ‘the most rapidly self-revealing person’ he had ever met. In an introductory note to the Collected Poems (1955), Spender admitted that he felt obliged to ‘own up’ to the poems of the 1930s that had become ‘an embarrassment to my ...”

“... of levelling death’; the wonderfully precise Australian John Manifold; and another soldier-poet, Geoffrey Matthews, who ended an ‘Elegiac Sonnet’ of 1943 about flowers at a graveside: . . . For his first low home Pastelled sweet-peas and grass For his green simplicity; And the gay daughter marigold For his sophistication. So he had wished to die ...”

“... passage: ‘Among the neglected men I have found Robert Bage, Henry Brooke, John Bunyan, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Delaney [sic], Emanuel Ford, William Godwin, Richard Graves, Robert Greene, Robert Henryson, Charles Johnstone, Charles Lever, M.G. Lewis, Thomas Lodge, Henry MacKenzie [sic], Thomas Malory, Charles Maturin, Walter Scott, Philip ...”