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“... The response of the girl on Passport Control at Heathrow was typical. ‘Where have you just come from, sir?’ she asked as she took my passport ‘Bogota,’ I replied. ‘Oh, Christ!’ she said, and handed it straight back, as if it might still be charged with danger. I have spent much of my time in Colombia over the last five years. Only once have I experienced anything like danger ...”

“... One of the tropes of Classical rhetoric, which surfaced again in the Jacobean fascination with death, was that of the relentless mutability of matter – Alexander the Great could be turned in his clay to the bung in a wine barrel. It is a trope that recurs repeatedly in Peter Redgrove’s recent work, You take turns to be food, Before you can grind wheat you have to be wheat, Before you can eat bread you are a nice new crust Eaten by Mary, who chooses a crust-you here, A mouthful of Shakespeare’s breath there, a glass Of transparent Genghis Khan there, but in a very different spirit from the Classical original ...”

“... study to be written about Oxford undergraduates of the 1960s – or perhaps this book is it. Roger Garfitt in his daffodil-yellow pinstripe suit and silver-topped cane – mingling with the other ‘heads’, boiling up asthma drugs for a hit, talking of samsara and Kropotkin – seems a type as exotic as an Elizabethan dandy: We would split an amp ...”

“... entirely admire. ‘You know what a procrastinating fucker I can be about letters,’ he wrote to Roger Garfitt in 1984. That time was of the essence is indicated, however, by a quirk picked up by Reid: Heaney’s habit of dating letters to the previous year. Of one Reid dates to 8 February 1979, he notes: ‘Rather late in the year for SH to be heading ...”