Hugo Williams’s most recent collection is Lines Off.
I was eight when I set out into the world wearing a grey flannel suit. I had my own suitcase. I thought it was going to be fun. I wasn’t listening. when everything was explained to us in the Library, so the first night I didn’t have any sheets. The headmaster’s wife told me to think of the timetable as a game of ‘Battleships’. She found me wandering...
1
Above our beds the little wooden shelf with one support was like a crucifix offering up its hairbrush, Bible, family photograph for trial by mockery.
We lay in its shadow on summer nights, denying everything, hearing only the impossible high catches for the older boys, their famous surnames calling them to glory.
2
Why did we take the bed-making competition so seriously? We were only nine....
It is difficult to assess the value of the part played by the organisation known as Phantom during this stage of our operations in North Africa.
Official History of the Second World War
Before the British public I was once a leading man, Now behind a British private I just follow, if I can.
When I grow up I want to have a bad leg. I want to limp down the street I live in without knowing where I am. I want the disease where you put your hand on your hip and lean forward slightly, groaning to yourself. If a little boy asks me the way I’ll try and touch him between the legs. What a dirty old man I’m going to be when I grow up! What shall we do with me? I promise...
Jim returns to his favourite Carnaby St boutique circa 1966 and nods his shaggy head. ‘Hi, Barry! Hi, Stu! Got the new flares in yet?’ The two Goths behind the counter in Plastic Passion have heard about people like Jim. One of them looks out a pair of tangerine elephant loons left over from his father’s ‘Chocolate Taxi’ scene and throws them to Jim as a joke....
It is a curious thing that of the three judges offering superlatives on the jacket of Hugo Williams’s Collected Poems – Edna Longley, Douglas Dunn and Peter Porter – none is...
The family, stuff of novelists as different as Rose Macaulay and James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Lewis Grassic Gibbon, is absent from much great poetry of the early 20th century. T.S....
How much do love and sex have in common? Not enough, it seems, for them to appear together in anthologies, which increasingly cater either for the sentimental or the pornographic market. We need...
Charles Tomlinson has a poem called ‘Class’ about the Midland pronunciation of the first letter of the alphabet. In the last chapter of Some Americans, the poet tells how for a short...
Old Glory – the book written by Jonathan Raban – is an altogether different book from the Old Glory that was praised in the reviews, but it is no less wonderful for that. The book the...
Craig Raine’s second collection follows swiftly upon his first, The Onion, Memory (1978). It is as if the poet had been waiting impatiently over us, while we picked ourselves up off the...
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