“... broke down again and failed to get a degree. Student friends, who included Philip Hobsbaum and Ted Hughes, registered that Redgrove was impressively unusual. Hobsbaum thought he bore ‘a resemblance to Frankenstein’s monster, only better dressed’. Harry Guest recalls him carrying ‘a swordstick with him’ – like a Mr Hyde escaped from Dr Jekyll’s ...”

“... cheeks in the hope that he might open his eyes for a moment and say hello or goodbye’ – about Robert Graves in Majorca, and about an old lady singing: Forty-four and forty-five Am I dead or am 1 alive? I know but I don’t care. I know about despair. This intensely personal structure of image and reference ensures that Blackburn is always present in her ...”

“... as the currently accepted canon of excellence in post-1945 poetry: a canon consisting of Larkin, Hughes and Heaney. These three poets of the period have been most often treated to admiring essays both here and in the States, and it is these three who more than any of their contemporaries figure on the school and university syllabus. It may be said of course ...”

“... with these two books; even the names of the poets – Charles Tomlinson, or David Gascoyne, or Robert Conquest, or John Holloway, or Christopher Middleton, or Geoffrey Hill – stood for a world that was fully England. Looking at the list of poets was like having one’s Irish nose pushed up against the polished glass of a posh window in some imaginary Big ...”

“... liked the essay by Alistair Stead on the art of naming in the fiction of Henry Green. Glyn Hughes’s creative personality contrasts sharply with David Storey’s. Where Storey draws his imaginative sustenance from what’s under his nose, and achieves his subtlest effects through a notation of the banal which salvages our most routine acts from ...”

“... salutations will be discovered by the likes of Donald Davie (‘droning out his tosh’), Ted Hughes (‘boring old monolith, no good at all – not a single solitary bit of good’) and Anthony Powell, aka ‘the horse-face dwarf’. There is even a ‘Hi, Ian’: he calls me ‘the Kerensky of poetry’. Not too bad, I thought at ...”

“... connected) had crossed the Channel: Geoffrey Winthrop Young, George Trevelyan, Geoffrey Keynes, Robert Graves (a former pupil) and Rupert Brooke (a contemporary at Magdalene). Another friend, Lytton Strachey, was renowned for his obsession with Mallory’s good looks (he credited him ‘with the face of a Botticelli’). In April 1915, Mallory wrote to ...”

“... Taj Mahal of beauty’. Or she ‘was like an animal, Ava. The sex thing.’ When Howard Hughes suggested that after her three previous marriages, he ought really to have a turn, she replied: ‘You make it sound like I’m a pony ride at the county fair.’ The posters for The Barefoot Contessa (1954) advertised her as ‘The World’s Most ...”

“... in the land, announced his resignation that morning. Not only Baroness Falkender but also Sean Hughes, the prospective Parliamentary candidate for Harold’s seat, describes the moment: he was teaching a class and was summoned from his desk by a caretaker, who commanded him to go home and change into a suit. ‘When I asked him what he was talking ...”

“... he urges us to be more exclusive: Let us not prefer Ashbery to Yeats, Let us not suppose T. Hughes, On shining floors, Goes waltzing with a lyrical Muse. But the rebuke comes in verse which itself should stand rebuked. It is a pity that Grigson, a good poet in a context in which achievement is likely to be occasional at best, spends so much spirit in ...”

“... a spindly figure in a cavern of clouds (above). The ‘Voice Figures’ created by Megan Watts Hughes with an eidophone (an instrument of her own invention) look like underwater vegetation. Robert Johnson’s extraordinarily long, extraordinarily gifted fingers (perhaps indicating Marfan syndrome) seem to span half of ...”

“... comment on themselves and on other texts. An early poem, ‘Plague Graves’, signals a debt to Hughes and speaks of litter being destroyed when                           Sheep maul beyond recognition alarmingly quickly the sandwich-paper memorials left by charabanc trippers, dissolving all tangible trace of us. Very soon in ...”

“... Harlem Renaissance was simply too much. Nor is poetry a profitable activity. A chastened Langston Hughes recalled returning to Harlem in 1924 after his wanderings in Africa and Europe to find the Renaissance in full swing: ‘Had I not had to earn a living, I might have thought it even more wonderful than it was. But I could not eat the poems I wrote. Unlike ...”

“... comedy and surrealism’. But these, relatively, are slight talents. McMillan’s poem ‘Ted Hughes is Elvis Presley’ is a fantasy in which Hughes, writing a poem, becomes a reincarnated Presley and starts singing to the foxes. It ends with a reference to Hughes’s poem ...”

“... diplomat, who had also been a personal assistant to Hammarskjöld, ran into an old acquaintance, Robert Ahier, at the Paris Opéra. Ahier was a journalist and now held a senior position with United Press International. In the course of their conversation, Ahier told Kemoularia that he had a tenuous lead on the fate of the Albertina. He had come across ...”