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“... don’t come out right, neither can a case be made out for division of the kind propounded by Tom Paulin, when he tries, in his poetry, to reinstate some indiosyncratic words: so Edna Longley contends. ‘Paulin creates division where unities [i.e. a common language, standard English] already exist.’ In fact, it ...”

“... held by the Irish to be one of the worst offences of which anyone is capable – by my dear friend Tom Paulin. Coincidentally, Tom Paulin has written a little introduction to the Dolan book in which he remembers how ‘as the political crisis in the North lengthened, I began to feel the need for a dictionary which ...”

“... on – probably all appalled to be mentioned in each other’s company, and by me: Joseph Brodsky, Tom Paulin and, most intimately though I knew him least, Ian Hamilton. When I sent him a copy of my first book, I realised I’d even purloined his initials for my title. I wasn’t of an age to have been reading, never mind submitting to, his magazines, The ...”

“... seems to be undergoing a resurgence. Tony Harrison has made extensive use of Northern idioms. Tom Paulin has been busy raiding Ulster (and, I suspect, Scottish) dictionaries. Craig Raine has produced a manifesto, ‘Babylonish Dialects’, on dialect’s behalf. And several of the books under review here – by Scots, Welshmen and British West ...”

“... with some knowledge of literature you will need to do quite a lot of research to figure out what Paulin is doing. This is not a complaint; we are dealing with a modern poet and would hardly expect a linked and lacquered historical account of the between-war years, with one thing giving rise inevitably, tragically, to another, although there is some of that ...”

“... commentary. And there are lots of educational backups, some, like lectures by Peter Ackroyd and Tom Paulin, now over, others, including various conferences and courses, still to come. The most visible, and in some ways the most instructive of the exhibits are those which demonstrate Blake’s technical innovations. Only one of his books, the early ...”

“... toast. Here’s mud in your eye. ‘Thatcherites’ are bantered in Baker’s book. It is in Tom Paulin’s anthology, though, that the identity of the arch-Thatcherite is unmasked, ‘a Thatcherite before Thatcher’. Ted Hughes, none other. The argument for this judgment does not enforce conviction: ‘His reaction against the civil decencies of ...”

“... loss, which passes show. Motion has ascribed to the boy his own zealotry of communication. Tom Paulin’s way with poetry is to seek an equilibrium between the immediacy of experience and patterns suggested by natural life, the seasons, the ebb and flow of things. His favourite season is in-the-beginning: some of the most stirring passages in ...”

“... of a piece of early Irish wisdom literature. I read it in the spirit of exasperation that the poet Tom Paulin expressed recently when he wrote: What I have to say’s dead obvious we’ve had x years of blood and shit and some of us have written poems or issued too many credos through the press. In the piece, the structure is that of question and ...”

“... will show, the prewar voices most audible today belong to Auden and MacNeice. From the maudlin Tom and Viv to Peter Ackroyd’s unauthorised Life and Carole Seymour-Jones’s Painted Shadow, the collateral damage, too, has been heavy. Even now, much about Eliot remains opaque: 13 years after the first volume of his letters appeared, we can only speculate ...”

“... Thatcher Thatcher and Bush Bush but they called Gorbachev Mr Gorbachev: that said something.’ Tom Paulin has said that Doyle ‘pushes Irish English to wonderful imaginative extremes’, but doesn’t mean by this quite what you might expect. Doyle is a wordmaster and you have to trust him, and do trust him, as to when the right word is ...”

“... of treason and treachery, to what, precisely, is he proclaiming his allegiance? As any reader of Tom Paulin’s timely collection of politico-literary pyrotechnics will instantly be made aware, even the word ‘Irish’ is a ‘baffling and contradictory term’: there are few simple answers. Paulin’s voice – in ...”

“... youngest of Kinsella’s contributors, but John Montague got him into the Faber anthology. Simmons Paulin, Ormsby, Carson, McGuckian ... the list goes on. Perhaps the most singular omission, though, is that of Michael Longley, whose Poems 1963-83, issued last year by the Salamander Press, shows a poet of incomparable fluency and discernment. When it comes to ...”

“... 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 defensiveness, representing ...”

“... seven-line rhyme-royal of ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ to the full Byronic eight-line ottava rima. Tom Paulin has a ponderous poem, from his collection A State of Justice (1977), titled ‘Thinking of Iceland’ (‘to go North to that island / that’s four days’ sailing from Hull/would be what? An escape?/Or an attempt at finding/what’s behind ...”