He also wrote mystery stories under the pseudonym of Nicholas Blake, most of which feature the fictional detective Nigel Strangeways.

During World War II, Day-Lewis worked as a publications editor in the Ministry of Information for the U.K. government, and also served in the Musbury branch of the British Home Guard.

[2] He was the son of Frank Day-Lewis, a Church of Ireland rector of that parish, and Kathleen Blake (née Squires; died 1906).

[4] In his autobiography The Buried Day (1960), Day-Lewis wrote: "As a writer I do not use the hyphen in my surname – a piece of inverted snobbery which has produced rather mixed results.

(c. 1940)[6] After the death of his mother in 1906, when he was two years old, Cecil was brought up in London by his father, with the help of an aunt, spending summer holidays with relatives in County Wexford.

[7][8] During the 1940s, he had a long and troubled love affair with the novelist Rosamond Lehmann, to whom he dedicated his 1943 poetry collection Word Over All.

Jill's father was deeply unhappy about the scandalous affair since she was named publicly as co-respondent in Day-Lewis' divorce.

[14] His appointment came after appointments secretary John Hewitt consulted with Dame Helen Gardner, the Merton Professor of English at the University of Oxford (who stated that Day-Lewis "produced run of the mill poetry but nothing particularly outstanding") and Geoffrey Handley-Taylor, chair of the Poetry Society (who stated that Day-Lewis was "a good administrative poet" and "a safe bet").

Cecil Day-Lewis died from pancreatic cancer on 22 May 1972, aged 68, at Lemmons, the Hertfordshire home of Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard, where he and his family were staying.

As a great admirer of Thomas Hardy, he arranged to be buried near the author's grave at St Michael's Church in Stinsford, Dorset.

[19][20] In 1935, Day-Lewis decided to increase his income from poetry by writing a detective novel, A Question of Proof under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake.

[7] Four of the Blake novels – A Tangled Web, A Penknife in My Heart, The Deadly Joker, The Private Wound – do not feature Strangeways.

Head of a Traveller features as a principal character a well-known poet, frustrated and suffering writer's block, whose best poetic days are long behind him.

The contributors were: Rex Warner, Edward Upward, Arthur Calder-Marshall, Barbara Nixon, Anthony Blunt, Alan Bush, Charles Madge, Alistair Brown, J.D.

After the late 1930s, which were marked by the widespread purges, repression, and executions under Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union, Day-Lewis gradually became disillusioned with communism.