On a small, handwritten poster affixed to a noticeboard in one of the university’s communal spaces, I read the words: ‘Robert Creeley: A talk’. Date and time were given, as well as a room number in one of the eighteenth-century buildings in Buccleuch Place which housed English faculty seminar rooms. The speaker was announced as Will Robbins, not a name familiar to me.

In the autumn of 1977 I was entering the final part of a four-year English degree course. During the academic session to come, as in the one lately ended, I would be pursuing my chosen specialization, American Literature. Many such talks took place on campus. Anyone could give one and anyone could attend. Just organize the use of a room, usually at lunchtime or after classes at 5.30, advertise your subject, and... talk. ‘Michael Boyd will speak on Ben Johnson’s “Sejanus”. All welcome.’ That was one I attended. A prominent figure around the university as a student, Boyd later became the artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company. At a more official level, Quentin Bell and John Wain entertained us with accounts of, among other things, Bell’s biography of his aunt, Virginia Woolf, and Wain’s book about Samuel Johnson, just published. A youthful Roger Scruton lectured a small group on aesthetics, not neglecting to toss disobliging references in the direction of the architecture all around, including the building in which we were assembled. Saul Bellow, in town to receive a prize in the name of the Highland novelist Neil Gunn, of whom he had until then lived in ignorance, took questions from the American Literature students in a room high ...