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“... years he spent working with Francis Crick in California in the 1960s by day and hanging out with Thom Gunn and his friends by night. This association of ideas, familiar from magazine profiles, is too neat to be persuasive. When Charlie meets him for a second time, towards the end of the book, Turing tells him the story of his life, but in this recension ...”

“... on Modern Society’ and ‘D. H. Lawrence and his Influence on the Development of the Novel’. Thom Gunn, the Anglo-American poet, was also there; and so was Derek Walcott from the West Indies. Participating in our cogitations was an audience of several hundred who had paid for the privilege of attending (and had thus presumably relieved some of the ...”

“... the infamous – Timothy Leary, Warhol, Ginsberg, Charles Laughton, Truman Capote, Natalie Wood, Thom Gunn, the Reagans, Leslie Caron, Nehru – but it’s their performance that’s gossiped about, not their morals. When he describes people it’s as if he’s making notes for prospective characters in his novels (‘We had Leslie Caron to supper last ...”

“... well to relax in his bonsai garden. They might, it’s true, find it a bit too well-tended. From Thom Gunn and Charles Tomlinson to (in their new collections) William Scammell and John Ash, English poets have thought of America as a place to hang loose, an adventure playground of the spirit. Eldorado moves Scammell beyond the erudite, edgy satirical ...”

“... a nomadic, rootless, perpetually mobile way of life. It’s a continuation of the America Thom Gunn discovered: At worst, one is in motion; and at best, Reaching no absolute in which to rest, One is always nearer by not keeping still. Motel Chronicles is part-journal, part-autobiography, part-scrapbook. Memories of childhood; meetings with his ...”

“... of the three best living British poets (as an index of Perkins’s preferences, the other two are Thom Gunn and C.H. Sisson). In the opposing camp, Tom Paulin provoked an indignant response in this journal in 1985 when he indicted Hill for his reactionary and derivative ‘kitsch feudalism’. Hill’s admirers responded with extreme ...”

“... is like other writers and artists who mean a lot to him: Vermeer, Cézanne, Hammershøi, Joyce, Thom Gunn. ‘It is annoying to have to keep saying that things are like other things,’ Bishop observed, ‘even though there seems to be no help for it.’ The centrifugal energy of Tóibín’s study is in part resisted, though, by a very specific sense ...”

“... but then when he’d read the story he changed his mind, and is now all for including it.’ Thom Gunn reported that Bishop told him that Lowell was her best friend; he seemed pleased to record that when he met Lowell a few years later and mentioned that he knew Bishop, Lowell also said: ‘Oh, she’s my best friend.’ What was peculiar and ...”

“... to Swaffham Prior in Cambridgeshire. His reputation among younger poets was starting to decline. Thom Gunn, whose collection The Sense of Movement Muir had reviewed favourably, wrote in November 1958 to a friend: ‘I increasingly feel that perhaps my good time is over, and I am destined to be an Edwin Muir for the rest of my life.’Reading​ Muir’s ...”

“... its postwar section makes room for Monty Python but not Geoffrey Hill, or Tony Harrison, or Thom Gunn, or Ted Hughes, or Craig Raine, or James Fenton, or Paul Muldoon, all of whom the Norton squeezes in at the eleventh hour. Ricks, for whom Heaney provides an effective endpoint, is probably right that many anthologies falter with the telltale ...”

“... set out to remedy this, promoting such new arrivals on the literary scene as William Golding, Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin and Sylvia Plath, all of whom soon became effectively canonised by their presence on school syllabuses. Critical Quarterly was committed to the centrality of poetry, fiction and drama to the living language, and to a ...”

“... he seems to learn about life in the course of his illness. In 1973 Oliver Sacks sent his friend Thom Gunn a copy of Awakenings. Gunn wrote back to say he remembered that in the 1960s Sacks had wanted to write a book that was both well written and scientifically sound. ‘You have certainly done it here.’ And then ...”

“... in half at the meeting of the two ‘whats’. This gives it five stresses, but very irregularly. Thom Gunn once drew attention to the striking effect of a similar repetition in a line from Measure for Measure, ‘Why all the souls that were were forfeit once,’ but this scans unexceptionally. Sometimes the sheer over-the-top breathlessness of James’s ...”

“... And there they were, Tom Raworth and Lee Harwood, linked in a Penguin, like Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn before them, markers for a generation. So where did it all go wrong? (Not for the poets, for us.) Raworth’s first proper book, The Relation Ship, was published by his own Goliard Press in 1967. Three illustrations by Barry Hall. ‘Off-set ...”

“... angelic secretariat. The more I struggled to be plain, the more Mannerism hobbled me. What for? Thom Gunn, in an enormously admiring essay, remarks of his earlier work: ‘His poetry has been, typically, personal and anecdotal, but the narrator was most comfortable as an almost anonymous observer … least comfortable at the centre of the poem where ...”