“... of Britons doing well out of Thatcherism – sailing round the country for his book Coasting, Jonathan Raban noted the number of new yachts – the apocalyptic sound and rhetoric of post-punk seemed out of date. In the second half of the book, Reynolds describes how the movement’s more pragmatic musicians left the genre behind and made more ...”

“... Anglia (‘full of fierce young smartyboots’, more interested in movies than books, according to Jonathan Raban). In fact he was very popular at UEA, but may have felt that some of the creative writers so successfully recruited and taught there found him old-fashioned and insufficiently ‘experimental’. Or perhaps more simply, as he said to Ian ...”

“... articulate much of what Auden called ‘nuance and scruple’, but then it never set out to. As Jonathan Raban once said, Carey was ‘the hatchetman’s hatchetman’. In his autobiography Carey recalls his early scholarly tasks of editing Milton and of compiling a student anthology of critical essays about Andrew Marvell, experiences that awoke him ...”

“... aggregation and accumulation. He is essentially a metropolitan writer and the urban aesthetic, as Jonathan Raban has argued, is noun-orientated, always striving to catalogue the density of new information that the city spews out. Kureishi’s soft-porn rites-of-passage movies and novels involve multiple pile-ups of disparate characters and social ...”

“... 2’ in History is a 14-line redaction of that, ending ‘my namesake, not the last Caligula’ (Jonathan Raban once suggested that Lowell’s idea of ‘revision’ was to throw on more negatives). As for ‘Caligula 1’ – that’s a revision of a translation of Baudelaire’s ‘Spleen’ that first appeared in Imitations. And so on, and so on, and ...”