Edward Lucie-Smith

"It's ten years since I heard, and Then one day a letter comes. It's neutral stuff, until I Delve into the envelope Again and find your photo, Handsome still, and not a line To tell me why you sent it."

"A poet of my kind Skates on the thinnest ice."

"My uncle [mother’s brother] wrote rather twee books of memoirs in the period between the two World Wars. They’d be deeply embarrassing to read today. In the 19th century my mother’s family were involved with the Pre-Raphaelites, and a direct ancestor of mine was Lady Byron’s lawyer, who advised her to leave the poet because of her husband’s affair with his half-sister. A much earlier ancestor on my mother’s side was chaplain to Richard Corbet, Bishop of Oxford, who wrote the poem ‘Farewell Rewards and Fairies’. In his ‘Brief Lives’ Aubrey describes them getting drunk together in the cellars of Christchurch, Oxford."