In fact her patience and understanding verged almost on the saintly at times

In fact, her patience and understanding verged almost on the saintly at times. She paid money in advance to the hard-pressed; she offered loans; she gave advice. She entertained to lunch at the office whenever some shoeless poet happened to drift through the Windy City She was always concerned for the welfare of her charges. And what did she get in return? From poet and critic Yvor Winters, she was on the receiving end of a cold and patronising savagery of a kind which would make any decent human being – let alone poet – wince, even today. From William Carlos Williams, she generally received, throughout a lifetime of intermittent correspondence, the fruits of a delightfully playful and charming intellect. He could even write about money matters entertainingly: “Dear Miss Monroe,” he advised her in May 1921, “after May 1st all poems by WCW will be $50 a piece, minimum – so get a thrill by rejecting $500 or $600 worth while you may.”But the man who bestrides this book like a colossus is Ezra Pound. Can there ever have been anyone quite so troublesome, so quarrelsome, so treacherous, and so browbeatingly difficult to deal with as this man? Harriet Monroe was often intimidated by his manner, but, for all his infuriating put-downs, she often survived his relentless and half-baked assaults with dignity and a calm resolve, and responded to him in exactly the way that he seems to have deserved.

Consider this beautifully level-headed and measured dismissal, for example: “Perhaps some time you will feel like telling me you regret your rather absurd letter.”And the prot? of whom she was fondest? Wallace Stevens, without a doubt Their correspondence had real warmth and a gentle wit. Here is Stevens thanking her, in December 1935, for a positive review of one of his books. “It was as if a rich uncle had died and left me everything he had.”This is an extraordinary book about an extraordinary enterprise which, year on year, survived one financial crisis after another by the skin of its teeth and through the sheer determination of a succession of dedicated editors. Of these, Miss Monroe, who died of a heart attack while she was attempting a 36-hour overland trip from Buenos Aires to Macchu Picchu in September, 1936, was surely the most remarkable..

Can it really be as bad as this? Reading Refusal Shoes, you wonder whether the immigration officers at passport control are as racist, homophobic, sexist, corrupt and dysfunctional as those in Tony Saint’s comic thriller Saint’s characters are undeniably offensive. Yet the author has done the job for 10 years, so presumably he knows what he’s talking about. Alongside the savage humour, Saint makes some serious points. The misfits and no-hopers of the Immigration Service regard their wall of desks as the white cliffs of Dover: the last line of defence in a siege which lasts 24/7. Those decamping from the Third World are termed “asylum seekers”. No one uses the word refugees because it implies “an unnacceptable level of sympathy within a system designed to flush the majority out as economic migrants”.Henry Brinks has been at Terminal C for five years and loathes it.