auden again - the centenary's only just started

Sorry: more Auden. He's everywhere. Ian Sansom says, in the Telegraph: "...it can be truly shocking, the work of a great artist, in its magnitude and in scope."

Of course he's stolen his syntax there from the old master.

And isn't it true! How often have you felt shocked, reading something, that someone could be so fruitful, so abundant - know so much, have so many ideas, be so big. I'm so glad he put it like this.

It's a wonderful vivid article. Beginning with a disarming story about how Sansom left his job at Foyles (where Ms B never bought a book from him, alas: I never shopped there, so put off was I by a) the fact that Christina Foyle wouldn't let the shop be unionised - my horror outlasted Christina Foyle & indeed persists to this day as a prejudice - and b) the queues) to start a PhD on Auden, it finishes like this:

"He is everywhere, if you look, in early Philip Larkin, in James Fenton, John Ashbery, Derek Walcott, Paul Muldoon, and particularly memorably in Gavin Ewart's ribald "The Short Blake-Style Gnomic Epigram", which reads simply, "A voice was heard from a bottle of hock, saying:/ I am the ghost of W H Auden's cock!" Isn't the character Hilary in Alan Bennett's play The Old Country a little bit like Auden? And that's him, for certain, as the detective Nigel Strangeways in Day-Lewis's novel A Question of Proof . I've slipped him into my own books, too, in quotation and disguised as minor characters. Like God, or a first love, he's gone, but not forgotten."