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“... most of their evenings at the Gargoyle Club, dancing to ‘Oh, you beautiful doll’ while Donald Maclean got drunk. They had, she says, some ‘idyllic years’ together, though the man Cyril Connolly called ‘the London Freddyair’ had his glum moments, waking his partner as he sang in his sleep ‘I’m always on the outside, on the outside looking ...”

“... described by MacNeice’s poem is a nexus of relationships rather than a place apart. It has a Norman castle, a Scottish quarter and an Irish quarter (‘a slum for the blind and halt’). MacNeice, as ‘the rector’s son’, was ‘born to the anglican order,/Banned for ever from the candles of the Irish poor’. Up the lane, at the lodge of an army ...”

“... his youth among a generation of thrawn poets with their country expansiveness: I’m thinking of Norman MacCaig in his Assynt mode; Iain Crichton Smith of the Highlands; George Mackay Brown in his Orkney remoteness; and Hugh MacDiarmid, always in among the fields and dykes, metaphysical or real. None of these men gave much quarter, and, next to them, Morgan ...”

“... pages, along with such recognised poets of high accomplishment as Gavin Ewart and Henry Reed, Norman Cameron and Robert Garioch, Roy Fuller, Hamish Henderson and Sorley Maclean – and many others wholly unknown to fame. It’s true that sensitive annotation of individual experience was the hallmark of their generation ...”