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“... Fitzgerald. Nor need such nostalgia be confined to France: Philip Hope-Wallace at El Vino’s, Dylan Thomas in the Fitzroy and the Yorkshire Grey, W. H. Auden at the Hope and Anchor in Birmingham. Since we cannot all share in the intimacy of the Traveller’s or Le Jockey, we have to find the common terrain of pub and café. Mr Lottman is on firmer ...”

“... which introduces a functional analysis of the central section of Stravinsky’s In Memoriam Dylan Thomas. The index to this material occupies a further four and a half pages, and contains such fascinating entries as ‘sadism, Webern’s in-turned’. The book is generally superlative in tone, and Keller’s fondness for verbal inflation leads him ...”

“... such painful shape in By Grand Central Station. It was an idiom of the time, mostly invented by Dylan Thomas, whose voice is heard in lines like ‘My pig-faced kingdom with tongues of wrong’, but exploited by George Barker as a continuous rhetoric. Some of Thomas’s poems eclipse and perfect the manner, rise ...”

“... outrageously bejewelled manner is as dangerous in its idiosyncrasy as that of Hopkins or Dylan Thomas. Problems persisted into D’ Aguiar’s most recent collection, British Subjects (1993), and it comes as no surprise that he should recently have turned to fiction: the loose baggy monster offers more room than poetry for certain kinds of ...”

“... match and the cup, the barley takes on an additional poignancy from the cacophony before it (by Dylan Thomas out of Hopkins) and chiming silliness after it, like Auden’s pastiche of Hopkins in The Orators. To say this is to register a failure of Nicholson’s regionality and shrewd ingenuousness, for nothing could be more remote from these poems than ...”

“... as ‘impossible piss . . . shameful shagbaggery . . . shit really’ or to be told that Dylan Thomas is ‘frothing at the mouth with piss’? In his bibulous, old fartish final years, Kingsley Amis came over as a rather unpleasant piece of work and one of the effects of these published letters – especially the early ones to Larkin – is to ...”

“... had proposed that the chapel be turned into a swimming-pool. How Alan had loathed the loathsome Dylan Thomas. How Alan had crossed swords with C.S. Lewis, Magdalen’s Fellow in English, on this or that occasion. How, on being asked as a young man at interview whether it was true that he had strongly-held left-wing views, he had replied: ‘No. I have ...”

“... Isaiah Berlin, Tippett, Betjeman and Fred Hoyle became familiar voices. Louis MacNeice and Dylan Thomas made a poet’s living in what Thomas called ‘the thin puce belfries’ of the Third. Guided by the producer Douglas Cleverdon, Under Milk Wood and Beckett’s All That Fall came into being; and drama ...”

“... by the small magazines, published by Eliot, anthologised by Yeats, and understood, alongside Dylan Thomas, to be one of the chief lyrical men of the age. Anaïs Nin, of all the spotters of seedy excellence, names him in her diaries as the sort of person who might put a pulse into a dull room: George Barker comes, with his dilated Celtic blue ...”

“... talent drinking itself to death. The ‘Roberts’ (Colquhoun and MacBryde) were there beside him; Dylan Thomas was boozing in the same pubs. Art is not made in that spirit any more. The notion that all things are a gamble, that candles should be burnt at both ends, that poverty is often art’s handmaid and scrounging talent’s privilege does not come ...”

“... of his journal, ‘I shall break out soon.’ As well as the diary, there were Miller poems of a Dylan Thomas-ish persuasion and a Miller radio play based on the life of Drummond of Hawthornden. Miller’s liking for this great complainer continues to this day, and there is a fine chapter on him in Rebecca’s Vest. For the woeful ...”

“... indeed bright with insiderism as he treks around Fitzrovia with Tambimuttu, Julian Maclaren-Ross, Dylan Thomas and the gang. ‘Senses were heightened, perceptions changed, new visions possible,’ he burbles, but even he finds it hard to convince himself that this heady atmosphere produced much in the way of even half-decent poetry and ...”

“... to find out who Hanabeke is. This is good prose which should be read aloud slowly on the radio (as Dylan Thomas used to read Davies’s Autobiography of a Super-Tramp). Two new English comedies seem wan and sad after these four exuberant, exotic plants. The author of Train to Hell is an Alternative Comedian: that means, the sort that doesn’t make you ...”

“... fat target, but no, he refrains, implying, rather in the spirit of Malcolm Brinnin’s book on Dylan Thomas, that the whole business was repetitively sad rather than wonderfully awful. Press on, and never say die, is the general impression, both of the author and of his characters. ‘As number one, Alun had naturally secured the front passenger ...”

“... of Warner’s inventions nod to Joyce (the ‘sun-usedness’ of a road’s macadam) and some to Dylan Thomas (‘the mangle of winter-fall before just the owl-black, pine marten world began’). Some have a distinctive character of their own, as when Warner records that ‘a few cassandras of laugh tremelled along the wall.’ Despite the sparkle of ...”