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“... wrote for Granta. They contributed to a 1952 issue, edited and illustrated by Mark Boxer; so did Thom Gunn and Eric Hobsbawm. Hugh wrote a story about Monsieur Alphonse, a maître d’hôtel at a place called The Panache, and an appreciation of Benjamin Constant. The contributor’s note for Hugh says: A prominent Union Speaker. Has contributed to ...”

“... that has the same machinery as the funny ones but is shockingly serious. It occurs in a poem by Thom Gunn, long meditated, it seems, but published only in Boss Cupid in 2000: One image from the flow Sticks in the stubborn mind: A sort of backwards flute. The poker that she held up Breathed from the holes aligned Into her mouth till, filled up By its ...”

“... withholds something ‘even when [the speaker’s] emotion is the subject of the poem’, as Thom Gunn said of Hardy’s uses of ballad. And, as often with ballads, there is just a hint of hoax. The English musical renaissance before the war is intimately linked to what Parker calls the rediscovery of England after the war: as a response to place ...”

“... any category during this period) take the form of elegies for gay men who died of Aids. They are Thom Gunn’s The Man with Night Sweats and Mark Doty’s My Alexandria. Both books portray a world which Forster would have marvelled at, where gay happiness – pace Foucault – is the norm. If endlessness offered itself to me today I don’t think I’d ...”

“... famous, had more or less stopped. It had published big figures in the 1950s: Larkin; a hardback of Thom Gunn’s Fighting Terms. It was all done by Oscar Mellor, a painter and photographer and, possibly, a pornographer. I think I might have gone to see him, knowing this connection with poetry publishing, to ask him about design or something. Anyway, we ...”