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“... When wing to wing, feather by feather, the rooks were piecing night together, I took the ring the iron-lipped iron-lidded lion gripped and tapped the call-sign on his hide. He knew me, nodded, moved aside, and as the light fell through the door I walked into your head once more. I could distinguish, layer by layer, each constituent of the air: vellum and beeswax; apple, oak, and elm gone up in years of smoke; tanned pastry, ghosts of roasted meat; the breath of oxlips, wintersweet, jasmine, and Stanley Spencer’s tall Corinthian hyacinths on the wall ...”

“... All this takes place on a hilly island in the Mediterranean,’ Picasso said. ‘Like Crete. That’s where the minotaurs live, along the coast. They’re the rich Seigneurs of the island. They know they’re monsters and they live, like dandies and dilettantes everywhere, the kind of existence that reeks of decadence in houses filled with works of art by the most fashionable painters and sculptors ...”

“... For Gail and Zellman Warhaft and in memory of Sasha Warhaft 1985-1988 All I can hope is that the voice of Kavadias may be heard, however faintly, from the bridge on a dark night somewhere in the Indian Ocean. Gail Holst Warhaft, translator: The Collected Poems of Nikos Kavadias 1 Tonight, as the tropic day drops its sail and flocks of marabou are flying west, I’m needled by a need to have it out, the cancerous secret in my chest ...”

“... For Ramsay Howie in memory of Bill Howie, 1892-1915 and Peggy Howie. 1908-1980 Another time,   another place. Glossy as a conker   in its cushioned case. Lift and tighten   the horsehair bow, shuttle rosin   to and fro. Hold the note   there, that first note jubilant from   the fiddle’s throat. I She remembered the singing. No voice that she knew and no words, but a cadence, the speech of a heart with cause to rejoice ...”

“... for Isaiah Berlin My story? Yes, I got my story though not the one I was assigned. It was a Voyage of Discovery all right, but of another kind. The latest Russian Revolution was no sooner known than it– whoosh– un- corked Moscow like shaken champagne, filled Red Square to the brim again with chanting thousands. When Apollo appeared on the balcony, they let out a shout heard miles away ...”

“... The author of ‘Naming of Parts’, probably the most anthologised English poem of the Second War, has too often been held to be that and that only. Like Julian Grenfell, author of ‘Into Battle’, he is seen as the saddest freak of the literary fairground: the one-poem poet. The publication of his collected poems will give the lie to that gross misperception ...”

“... legitimate poems make a public display of the illegitimate offspring of his apprentice years?’ Jon Stallworthy asks in the afterword to Singing School. His short answer is: ‘because, to the best of my knowledge, no one else has done so, and the schooling of poets seems a potentially rewarding subject.’ The longer answer is that ‘in the early ...”

“... pointing out that Thoreau’s crown of Thoreaus was remembering happier things. (He liked puns: Stallworthy points out that the epigraph to ‘Lessons of the War’ – vixi puellis nuper idoneuslet militavi non sine gloria – substitutes puellis, ‘girls’, for Horace’s duellis, ‘wars’. This is a better pun than the Seattle ones, especially as it ...”

“... war poets. Was ‘the war to end all wars’ also the war to end all war poetry? The best part of Jon Stallworthy’s introduction to his Oxford Book of War Poetry is a discussion of the chivalric ideal in the British public school classes of the 19th century. ‘Honour the charge’ makes the cavalrymen of the Light Brigade into Arthurian ...”

“... himself too well? Another reason for the delay in preparing a MacNeice Life might be deduced from Jon Stallworthy’s Introduction to the book we are now offered: In 1976, as an editor of the Clarendon Press, it was my good fortune to oversee the publication of Professor E.R. Dodds’s autobiography, Missing Persons. Acquaintance ripened into friendship ...”

“... you are’. Yet even under these conditions, it was hard to resist the force of her personality. Jon Stallworthy had called her ‘the New England Nefertiti’. Anne upstaged Max again that night at the reading, making an entrance slowly from the back of the room in a long red dress, diamond rings flashing on her bony fingers as she chain-smoked through ...”

“... be righted by my choice. But I have seen no evidence that the move to England amounted to exile. (Jon Stallworthy is writing the Life of MacNeice and may have evidence in hand.) After Sherborne, MacNeice went to Marlborough, well enough described in his unfinished and posthumously published autobiography, The strings are false (1965). One of MacNeice’s ...”

“... it strange’, as the Formalists would say, is conveyed in the selection of poems translated by Jon Stallworthy and Peter France, and in France’s excellent study Poets of Modern Russia, which besides that on Pasternak contains informative essays on Blok, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, Mayakovsky, and the poets of today. A particularly admirable ...”

“... as alive as Sorley, Ledwidge, and their other English opposite numbers admirably presented by Jon Stallworthy. Ian Higgins has done an equally good job for the young Frenchmen or Belgians – Gaston de Ruyter, Jean de La Ville de Mirmont, Marc de Larreguy de Civrieux – and V. Nersessian gives selections from the work of young Armenians killed in ...”

“... hadn’t read William Percy.’Lennard likewise had the good sense to inquire of Tony Harrison and Jon Stallworthy as to his speculations about their parentheses. (Confirmed, though not thereby proved.) He and we wouldn’t have to take the poets’ word for it, but how odd of differently-minded critics to want to shut their ears to the poets’ words ...”