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“... the approval of their audience. The first play, Sherlock Holmes chez Duhamel, was written by Mr Auden for performance by Form V. It was a representation of a visit of Sherlock Holmes to France, and showed the attitude of the French towards his methods of deduction.’ The report passes over the play in silence, preferring the scenes from The Wind in the ...”

“... dragged by the scruff of its neck towards an always glorious, but always receding climax. As W.H. Auden remarked in another context, those leaders who believe in the possibility of utopia would be shirking their civic duty if they did not terrorise their citizens into acceptance. Stalin did not shrink from his civic duty, any more than Lenin did. He knew how ...”

“... is Alberto Cavalcanti’s Coal Face, made for the GPO film unit in 1935, with a script by W.H. Auden and a score by Benjamin Britten. The film, Cavalcanti said, was ‘an experiment in sound’. Western Deep has a similarly unpredictable soundtrack, shifting abruptly from deafening loudness to silence. The miners at TauTona, however, are accorded far less ...”

“... Shaw was ‘a sewing-machine that clicked and smiled’. Greene sticks a kitchen knife into W.H. Auden and this makes no impression at all, so they settle down to chat. Auden says he holds a position on the science faculty of a university, and Greene tells him: ‘It would be fun if you could discover one small scientific ...”

“... difficult to define what is, or is not, a ‘fact’ of his ‘life’. If both Eliot and Auden, to name only two, showed a strong disinclination to have their lives written, the reason may not have been that they had secrets to hide, or disliked public discussion of their work, so much as that they recognised that the biographer is, like the ...”

“... In The Orators W.H. Auden classified bird buffs as ‘excessive lovers of self’: they illustrate the psychological type who is ‘unable to taste pleasure unless through the rare coincidence of naturally diverse events, or the performance of a long and intricate ritual’. Redmond O’Hanlon sees his own career as a bird-watcher originating along similar lines to this but rather more romantically ...”

“... You really cannot tell fully about a thing until the man’s work is all there,’ Auden said in an interview a few months before he died. Thanks to the magnificent efforts of Edward Mendelson, it’s now all here: prose, plays, libretti and, finally, the poems, coming to just over 7500 pages all told. Sizing up these volumes, one might take courage from a line in ‘The Labyrinth’: ‘Assume this maze has got a plan ...”

“... illustrious admirers have ranged from Virginia Woolf to Derek Walcott, from Robert Frost to W.H. Auden, from Thomas Hardy to T.S. Eliot, not to speak of confrères such as Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke and Henry Newbolt. Ezra Pound, although savage in his denunciation of the use of idioms or phrases such as ‘dim lands of peace’ – locutions that abound ...”

“... minor adjustments to accepted literary history. In Part II, ‘Translation in the Canon of W.H. Auden’, Dr Schaffer’s gloomy account of contemporary attempts to impose some new order on the past turns out to be vindicated. The Auden commemorated here is the consciously Nordic figure who liked to claim descent from the ...”

“... That is the way things happen,’ Auden writes in ‘Memorial for the City’, a poem Edward Mendelson dates from June 1949,                           for ever and everPlum-blossom falls on the dead, the roar of the waterfall coversThe cries of the whipped and the sighs of the loversAnd the hard bright light composesA meaningless moment into an eternal factWhich a whistling messenger disappears with into a defile:One enjoys glory, one endures shame;He may, she must ...”

“... or cannot build castles. The natural rival of this Oxford Book is the Faber Book, compiled by W.H. Auden and Louis Kronenberger and first published in 1962. Auden was himself an aphorist (he is represented in Gross’s collection), and Kronenberger was a connoisseur of the form, so their book, which will take a bit of ...”

“... Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us. ‘Refugee Blues’, W.H. Auden Marseille is an old-fashioned town. ‘You still have a queen,’ the lady checking museum tickets remarked. ‘So why don’t you cut her throat? Kings and queens are pointless, cost a fortune.’ Red Republicanism, 1793 brand, is not extinct here. This ...”

“... The surprise is that instead of lecturing on Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Gertrude Stein and Marianne Moore, all of whom he acknowledges as ‘major influences’, he discusses an eclectic group of 19th and 20th-century poets who for the most part have endured long periods of neglect: John Clare, Thomas Lovell ...”

“... streets. Loving him went with being crushed by him, even posthumously. On his visit to China W.H. Auden took along Motley’s The Rise of the Dutch Republic, in which, as John Fuller informs us in his Commentary (1998), he was depressed to read the catalogue of tortures and massacres attributed to William the Silent. The official report of William’s death ...”

“... in this book), but anyway looks uncertain of its status, like a joke title thought up by W.H. Auden for a poem. The parodies provide a respite from this nightmare. Even incidentally, there’s a broad, unlikely set of references to literature – to Saki and John Fowles and Gatsby’s ‘old sport’. In more detail, a character called Clem Snide does a ...”