Bankruptcy and divorce led to several years of travel which took him to Berlin, Venice, British Columbia and Iran, amongst other places.

During World War II he served in the Royal Artillery as an intelligence officer in India and Burma, he left the army with the rank of major.

Her brother-in-law was Albion Harman, son of the self-proclaimed King of Lundy, the largest island in the Bristol Channel.

[3] In 1949 Russell founded the literary magazine Nine (named after the Nine Muses) which in its eleven issues published many notable poets including George Barker, Basil Bunting, Roy Campbell, Ronald Duncan, Paul Eluard, William Empson, David Gascoyne, Robert Graves, Michael Hamburger.

In the mid-1970s he held a writing fellowship as poet in residence at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, where he met his second wife, Lana Sue Long, who was around 30 years his junior.

After leaving Canada, the family moved to Tehran, where Russell taught and studied at the Imperial Academy of Philosophy.

In 1989 Lana returned with the three children to North America, settling in Jackpot, Nevada, and the couple divorced in the 1990s.

Life at the mill was rudimentary, and there was hardly any furniture, although there were thousands of books in a variety of languages, and a supply of whisky and cigarettes.

He was a cousin of Bertrand Russell[8] He died in the hospital at San Giovanni Valdarno, only 15 minutes or so by car from Pian di Scò.

He is an immensely learned writer with an anti-academic temperament, a Modernist bewitched by classicism, a polyglot rooted in demotic English, an experimentalist in love with strict traditional forms, a natural democrat suspicious of the Left, and a mystic committed to clarity.