“... had exhausted the poetic impulse. Nothing was left for us to do.’ The Chicago poet and editor Paul Carroll, born in 1926, wrote: To a young poet the scene in American verse in the late 1940s and early 1950s seemed much like walking down 59th Street in New York for the first time. Elegant and sturdy hotels and apartment buildings stand in the enveloping ...”

“... who can’t see beyond the Georgians, as when he recommends to those unable to read Sanskrit Paul Deussen’s 1897 translation into German of Brihadaranyaka-Upanishad, where the ‘fable of the meaning of the Thunder’ can be found. His note, on the other hand, on Tiresias (the blind ancient Greek prophet who had been both man and woman) suggested a way ...”

“... confrontation with slow-burning loss (‘I came to grief late in life’ are the opening words) of Paul Bailey’s Gabriel’s Lament. There’s no mention in Porter’s book of those five stages, and the idea of ‘moving on’ from grief doesn’t get much of a look in. When friends (those unreal people, murmuring soothing advice into a smoking ...”

“... Dyke at half past one in the afternoon.15 February. Not having a book on the go I take up again Larkin’s Letters to Monica which I’d tried to read when it first came out but given up. It’s more interesting than I’d thought then but not much more, with too many post-mortems on previous meetings, what he had said to her, what she had said to him and ...”

“... Dryden’s long-proposed heroic poem, an altogether opposite sense of the poet has been voiced. Paul Hammond’s John Dryden: A Literary Life (1991) asserts that Dryden could most certainly have realised his early hope to ‘make the world some part of amends for many ill plays by an heroic poem’. Hammond goes on: The writing of an heroic poem was ...”

“... he talked mostly to him, but Princess Margaret didn’t confine herself to John Gielgud and Paul Eddington but to her credit wanted to meet the boys in the play, which she did, though I suspect most of them had no idea who she was. In 1984 Snowdon took pictures of me for (I think) the Sunday Times after the shooting of A Private Function, the most ...”

“... I wanted to come to this piece, to this place, with an open mind, but my mind, to borrow from Larkin, is open like a drawer of knives. To avoid the usual problem with writing about Northern Ireland, to avoid the unspoken agenda, I wanted just to put people’s words down on paper. But people here are notoriously reticent until they know who you ...”

“... might infect what comes after with their banality. In this sense Orton (and to some extent Larkin) is exceptional, Orton’s early diaries written with the same peculiar slant on the world as his mature writings.1957 was the year I should have come down from Oxford but didn’t and one thing I think reading this tosh is that if I hadn’t got a First ...”