‘Could he have been that bad?’, asks my Dad of a review of Ackroyd’s Auden, which recommends a strong moral recoil from that poet on the grounds of, inter alia, egregious snot-eating.
Ian Hamilton once ended a batch review by saying a slim volume ‘had a nice cover’, but 1890s poet John Gray suffered the even worse indignity of a critic praising ‘the beauty of the margins’.
Reading Scotus Eriugena’s Greek-language poetry, writes his editor, is like watching Agamemnon take communion from the Patriarch of Constantinople.
Delighted to learn that the title of volume ten of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time derives from a scene where the rackety littérateur Lindsay Bagshaw wants to check a quotation in Palgrave's Golden Treasury, pulls a bookshelf down on top of himself, and says 'Books do furnish a room'.