I may have grown more attentive to the news and more alive to the world history and world-sorrow behind it.

It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that Tacitus was right and that peace is merely the desolation left behind after the decisive operations of merciless power.

Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.

No place in the world prides itself more on its vigilance and realism, no place considers itself more qualified to censure any flourish of rhetoric or extravagance of aspiration.

I suppose you could say my father's world was Thomas Hardy and my mother's D.H. Lawrence.

My father was a creature of the archaic world, really. He would have been entirely at home in a Gaelic hill-fort. His side of the family, and the houses I associate with his side of the family, belonged to a traditional rural Ireland.