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“... help ‘many slightly muddled, BBC-battered people to see things more clearly’.) The title of Geoffrey Lewis’s biography could have been ‘Quintin Hogg’, ‘Quintin Hailsham’ or just ‘Hailsham’. No one, after all, would dream of writing a biography of, say, Harold Wilson and calling it ‘Lord Wilson’ because deep down we know that was ...”

“... Thoughtful as always about how to win friends and influence people, Geoffrey Grigson in his latest book of poems congratulates himself that his elderly eyes If they remain alert Do the more easily recognise Squirming in his primal dirt Another verse-reviewing squirt. Well, it is nice to know where we stand, and after that rousing salute the most scrupulous reviewer need not be afraid of disturbing cultural harmony or bruising the petals of a sensitive plant ...”

“... Geoffrey Grigson’s best poem, and the type of his best poetry, is ‘His Swans’. Evidently and justly, he thinks well enough of it to put it in the Faber Book of Reflective Verse as his sole exhibit: Remote music of his swans, their long Necks ahead of them, slow Beating of their wings, in unison, Traversing serene Grey wide blended horizontals Of endless sea and sky ...”

“... her manuscript). The American critic Albert Gelpi’s acknowledgments in his new book on C. Day Lewis are typically strange. Gelpi has made his name writing about the history of 19th and 20th-century American poetry and poetics. For a critic whose most recent publications include an edition of Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose(1993), a book about Day ...”

“... praising him for unremembered virtues, like Hamlet. So the first thing to be said about Sean Day-Lewis’s biography of his father is that he is neither an Edmund nor a Hamlet. He has written a calm and generous book, free of either rancour or special pleading, a book that carries a convincing sense of objectivity. The book does two things that a good ...”

“... whose views about art differed deeply from his own. He was overwhelmed on first meeting Wyndham Lewis, called him ‘a great and scandalously ignored painter’, and as late as 1932 said Lewis was ‘by far the most active force among us’. But he nursed feelings of resentment that his admiration was not ...”

“... That it is a feat to be without spite is coincidentally manifested by the appearance of Geoffrey Grigson’s Recollections. Grigson’s jacket proffers, as a representative gnome: ‘I never heard T.S. Eliot laugh.’ Back in the book this stands on its lordly own in a section of ‘Items’. Some have never heard ...”

“... like marriage, sexual happiness or career success are scaled into insignificance. Thus in ‘Geoffrey and the Eskimo Child’, originally published in this journal, we trace in 18 pages the 18 years of Geoffrey and Tania’s marriage. In 1962 he gets an LSE first in the then fashionable social sciences. They ...”

“... in Roy Campbell’s spiteful caricature ‘MacSpaunday’ (MacNeice, Spender, Auden and Day-Lewis), a composite creature marked by its blend of glib Marxism, shameless self-advertising and large quantities of indifferent verse. As the popular label for the period suggests, Auden was from the start the dominating presence, and poetically he increasingly ...”

“... was an organised romantic. He made a profession of cards, fought in France, and used a leave on Lewis to create a constituency association to nominate him for the Western Isles. He eventually reached the House from western Enfield, and when Churchill heard him beat Bevan on the floor with facts, was at once propelled into Health. The two Labour men were ...”

“... Portrait of Zélide (Benjamin Constant’s mistress, Mme de Charrière) by Wharton’s friend Geoffrey Scott – Mainwaring’s Mysteries is the product of long and deep digging in all kinds of likely and unlikely places. And in this dogged quest, she has been driven by motives quite as mixed and dark as anything in Eugène Sue’s sensational Mystères ...”

“... prided himself on being the only person who could claim the friendship of those arch-enemies C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot. Lewis and Williams both aimed at the disruption of the realist novel though the use of erudite fantasy, drawing on Dante and Plato and Milton; they wanted to make contemporary England ...”

“... to co-operatives of conventional enterprises – the kinds of conversion introduced by John Lewis into his stores in 1929 and into Scott Bader in 1951 – and in the establishment of completely new co-operatives, a good deal more is possible than might be imagined. Although those who first have the idea and first risk their money are apt, not ...”

“... they do not name the people whose interviews with me are the subject of the application.Mr James Lewis QC, the mild-mannered counsel for the West Midlands Police, takes up most of the morning. The hearing is low key. No wigs, no histrionics. The judge is a pleasant-looking man in his late fifties. His concentration is impressive: he scarcely glances at the ...”

“... when he wrote in Italian. Throughout his career he worked as a translator, notably of Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein, Dos Passos, Melville and Dickens, and published essays on them and other English and American writers. In the 1930s, this was a conscious contribution to the Anti-Fascist intellectual culture which endured in Turin: as ...”