Auden's description of the Thirties, sitting in a bar in New York in September 1939, as a 'low dishonest decade' at least deglamorizes it.

Hitler appears in 1923, and looms larger as the diary enters Auden's "low dishonest decade."

In one of W. H. Auden's brilliant poems, "September 1, 1939," he called the 1930's "a low dishonest decade."

How do you reflect on the lives lost and the lies told in the course of what Pankaj Mishra calls our "low, dishonest decade"?

He lived in Germany and he wrote in Paris, where he died of alcoholism in 1939 at the end of that "low, dishonest decade."

So this was by no means entirely, as Auden described it, a "low, dishonest decade".

But his overriding message was that after "a dishonest decade" of the Clinton-Gore Administration, he would restore values to the White House.

Fast-forward to our own low, dishonest decade.

Its opening lines certainly speak to this anxious age: "I sit in one of the dives/On Fifty-second Street/Uncertain and afraid/As the clever hopes expire/Of a low dishonest decade."

Some have even likened it to another poet's corrosive assessment of politics at another time - W.H. Auden's description of the 1930's as "a low dishonest decade."