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“... a lectric bell under the dining-room carpet to call the maid who’d left way back as surely as Louis MacNeice alias Louis Malone had left the city on the lough and then had shuffled off this wiry copper coil long before the city hit the news again but it’s not the dring of that bell I’d press so my granny’d ...”

“... Henry Reed, Laurie Lee and Muriel Spark ‘exclusively mine’, and there were staff stars like Louis MacNeice and W.R. Rodgers (stars at the bar of the George as well as in Broadcasting House). It was in some ways a clique, but a distinguished one. Who listened? At the outset, perhaps fortunately, there was no reliable way of estimating the ...”

“... He is the son of an Irish bishop (this genealogy is presumably borrowed from Louis MacNeice, who became a friend of Blunt’s at Marlborough) and above all he is a connoisseur. ‘Art was the only thing in my life that was untainted.’ Art offered ‘the possibility of transcendence, even for the space of a quarter of an hour’. He ...”

“... a medium, a pulse); and the poet a vagrant, a collector, a compulsive notetaker, a Cassandra, a Louis MacNeice for the 21st century?This, I believe, is the case with Lawrence Joseph, whose A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems, is out this month (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $28). Joseph was born in Detroit in 1948, the son of Syrian and Lebanese ...”

“... overshadowed by Northern Irish coevals. If Killing Time is shadowed by any Ulster poet it is the Louis MacNeice of Autumn Journal (1938), another long poem with long lines which drew on contemporary events. In Moon Country (1996) Armitage and Glyn Maxwell travelled to Iceland in the footsteps of MacNeice and ...”

“... and surely the best, is The Untouchable (1997): his reworking of Anthony Blunt’s life, by way of Louis MacNeice, which stands out among the vast literature inspired by the Cambridge spies. Ten years ago he published The Sea, a sometimes mesmerising novel that won the Booker Prize. Some found it mannered, chilly and over-controlled – but that tends to ...”

“... James Fox unconcerned in a bath towel sits on his arse in Bloomsbury Square,’ was how Louis MacNeice put it in one of his last poems. His right leg is extended so that one sandalled foot edges over the pediment – my fingers fit easily into the grooves between his toes. Most days, passers-by stop to look at the statue. You can get a good ...”

“... the Earl of Chesterfield and then to the Prince of Wales and his son, the future George III. The Louis Armstrong of Augustan England ended his days, apparently, as royal gamekeeper at Cliffden and Richmond Park.On the Continent, meanwhile, things were changing fast. In Baroque Bohemia, as Tuck-well lucidly relates, the horn took a ‘great leap ...”

“... the texture still further: Wyeth, Soutine, the Mabinogion, O. Henry, Spinoza, Giraldus Cambrensis, Louis Aragon, Gerard de Nerval, Terence Malick, lots of Yeats, lots and lots of Masefield’s ‘Cargoes’, Scott Fitzgerald, Delmore Schwartz, Marilyn Monroe, Un Chien Andalou, Hart Crane, Ben Hur... An index to proper names in the book would be several pages ...”

“... of the social life to come, but more immediate relief was available from schoolfellows such as Louis MacNeice, T.C. Worsley, Ellis Waterhouse and Anthony Blunt. The school magazine printed his poems, he played Puck, and Maria in Twelfth Night; he had love affairs, and was recognised as an aesthete. The best evidence of aestheticism was his ...”

“... Peadar O’Donnell. It attracted an eclectic range of contributors: Elizabeth Bowen, John Hewitt, Louis MacNeice, Patrick Kavanagh, Hubert Butler, Flann O’Brien, Liam O’Flaherty and others. ‘Cannot we all meet, throwing in what we have?’ Bowen wrote in her essay ‘The Big House’, published in the Bell’s first issue. The magazine accordingly ...”

“... as is feasible in an autobiography) he writes extensively of his relations with Auden, Eliot, MacNeice (whom he appointed to a lectureship in Classics at Birmingham) and Yeats. Dover, by contrast, appears to know no one outside academic life, with the exception of his own family and the odd Presbyterian minister. This may be just a personal ...”

“... with his sister Cynthia. At Marlborough he was a contemporary of Anthony Blunt, and just junior to Louis MacNeice and John Betjeman. Among his friends at Oxford were Isaiah Berlin, Maurice Bowra and Stephen Spender, with whom he coedited the magazine Oxford Poetry in 1930. In his excellent introduction to this definitive Complete Poetry, Peter Robinson ...”

“... contemporaries Walter Allen and Reggie Smith – by a young lecturer in the Classics Department, Louis MacNeice. Reed had a remarkable speaking voice and a gift for mimicry (and for assuming the accents of a class not his own), and as an undergraduate he acted in and produced plays, which may have led to his career in radio; in any case, for the rest of ...”

“... died. She also includes written evidence from the distant past: letters by Blunt’s schoolfriend Louis MacNeice, for instance, and most startlingly, the brisk character sketches written for his masters in Moscow by Arnold Deutsch, the agent who recruited Blunt in London. There are some instances when she might have ignored the testimony she ...”