SOURCE: Miller, Karl. “Suffering and Control United.” Spectator 288, no. 9063 (20 April 2002): 40-1.

In the following review, Miller offers a favorable assessment of Hamilton's Against Oblivion.

Ian Hamilton died on 27 December, to the great grief of those who knew him or cared about his work. Like one of those ‘men of letters’ who are sometimes supposed to have vanished from the scene, he worked in a number of different capacities. He was a poet, an editor, an essayist, a reviewer, an anthologist and a biographer. It all began in Darlington, where he grew up, fell in love with football, and studied with a Leavisite schoolmaster. Leavis's teachings appealed to him, but he didn't exactly enlist: the trouble with Leavis's call to arms, he felt, was that he wouldn't let anyone join up, and Ian was never much of a joiner anyway. He went to Oxford and stayed on there for...