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“... reviews. The verse is of a high standard. We see poems that helped establish the reputations of James Fenton and Craig Raine; poems by Heaney and Lowell; and Peter Porter’s ‘An Australian Garden’, which counts among his best things. Of the short stories, ‘Solid Geometry’ is a reminder that TNR played host to Ian McEwan when he was still ...”

“... Allan. One moment I want to go, the next I don’t.’ There, he gave a reading at the YMHA with James Fenton, and opened with ‘Lament’. He saw some of Noseworthy’s friends and wondered if he’d ever see them again. Once ‘the most sociable city in the world’ – as he had called it back in 1959 – New York now seemed empty. ‘Now, as when ...”

“... the latest leaflet, or procuring another drink. And there were the Americans. I remember James Fenton noticing how they would cluster a little closer together and talk in a fashion slightly more intense. Mainly Rhodes or Fulbright scholars, they had come from every state of the union with what amounted to a free pass. The Yanks of Oxford were ...”

“... The population is praised for puffing its way stoically through the shrieking pieties of King James I, whose pamphlet on the matter warned loyal subjects that it was ‘a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs’. The tendency of those in authority to show who’s in charge by issuing no-smoking ...”

“... between the houses. It is not the streets that exist. It is the streets that no longer exist. James Fenton, ‘A German Requiem’ The topic of international space is like one of those monstrous catfish which used to loaf around the hot-water outfalls of the Berlin power stations. You could hook it, net it, spear it, or even seize it in your arms if ...”

“... to style (Howard is very acute here) and the recruitment of played-out columnists like – well, James Fenton once composed a ‘Dick Crossman Blues’, to the tune of ‘Saint James’ Infirmary’, a stave of which went: Oh we didn’t like being beastly As we showed him to the door But when he brought in ...”

“... ridiculous, and ultimately fictional. Ingrams to this day keeps a life-size cut-out figure of Sir James in his office – an appropriate touch, since the main result of the case (officially an expensive score-draw) was to turn Goldsmith into Goldenballs, the plump businessman into the cardboard villain. Geoffrey Wansell usefully restores a third dimension to ...”

“... Douglas Dunn, Craig Raine, Christopher Reid, Anne Stevenson, Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian and James Fenton are absent because Davie thinks they play no significant part in this history, then what are we to make of the omissions of J.H. Prynne and Roy Fisher, heroes of Davie’s earlier study of the contemporary, Thomas Hardy and British Poetry ...”

“... knowingly intermeshed, of a considerable critical experience. In this sense he often resembles James Fenton, moving around a fictionalised world without fully revealing the logic of its narratives. Many of its gestures have a melancholy largeness: ‘it seems like all we ever hoped for,’ ‘Our lives were wasted but we never knew,’ ‘there is ...”

“... verse. This nostrum begs many questions, but it remains a good rule-of-thumb. By this test, Clive James is a true poet. Line after line of his has a characteristic personal tone, a kind of end-stopped singingness which is almost independent of what it says. The following are taken at random from Other Passports: Like injured ozone to angelic wings ...”

“... and Morrison published in Contemporary British Poetry: Douglas Dunn, Anne Stevenson, Craig Raine, James Fenton, Andrew Motion, Derek Mahon, Fleur Adcock, Carol Rumens, Medbh McGuckian, Penelope Shuttle and others. Geoffrey Hill, Dannie Abse, Denise Levertov, Peter Red-grove, U.A. Fanthorpe, Gillian Clarke, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Elaine Feinstein are ...”

“... Caliban’s withering speech on art’s place in society, pitched in the late style of Henry James where happy endings are in short supply. ‘We should not be sitting here now, washed, warm, well-fed, in seats we have paid for, unless there were others who are not here … others who have not been so fortunate.’ Near the end of his life Auden said ...”

“... There are​ two portraits Roger Fenton took of himself, separated by only a year, one of them in the exhibition of his photographs of the Crimean War at the Queen’s Gallery in Edinburgh (until 26 November) and the other not. The first, from 1854, seems conventional: we see a Victorian gentleman – hair parted, beard trimmed to cover only the underside of his face, leaving the strong chin to fight its own battles – seated in a chair, his arm resting on a covered table ...”

“... have averted their gaze since the war, just as Freya von Moltke said they did before it. As James Fenton wrote in ‘A German Requiem’: It is not your memories which haunt you. It is not what you have written down. It is what you have forgotten, what you must forget. What you must go on forgetting all your life. As Owings points out, they have ...”

“... the contemporary Irish-language poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle through James Kelman. At stake in Longman’s ‘British’ rebranding of Norton’s ‘English’ title is more than the pedantry that Ricks dismisses with the observation that ‘people do not as yet say that they love or study British literature’. (The Longman may ...”