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“... to give a junior colleague a leg-up is surpassed only by that of Salman Rushdie, J.M. Coetzee and Thomas Pynchon. There’s clearly a connection between reclusiveness and readiness to puff, even if Rushdie’s withdrawal from the public eye was neither voluntary nor permanent. Maybe it’s simply a question of having plenty of time on one’s hands. Or ...”

“... temporarily displaced or driven underground by the cosmopolitan experimentalism of the modernists: Thomas Hardy. It is interesting to find Gunn invoking a writer with whom he might not, at first blush, seem to have much in common. Although Hardy’s ‘mastering obsession’ is loss and ‘regret for the past’, Gunn reflected, his apparently confessional ...”

“... heart.’ Baldwin could always write badly, and often did. He loved lurid phrases, as if he was Dylan Thomas on an outing (‘I left my village one wild, sweet day,’ ‘I smiled and I really felt at that moment that Judas and the Saviour had met in me’); and Giovanni, all urchin innocence and doom, is one of the most unbelievable characters in ...”

“... is a man obsessed by death. There is a moving account of his response to the death of his friend Dylan Thomas, and remembered passages of death-ridden poetry that he was fond of reciting. One anecdote sums up his life – and perhaps his poetry too. MacNeice had been on an all-night binge, ostensibly to prove that you could drink round the clock in ...”

“... Although Osbert liked to seem extravagant and was often generous to writers he believed in (Dylan Thomas and George Barker received welcome gifts from time to time), he usually looked for a return on his investments. He needed always to control his beneficiaries and when crossed in finance he could turn vindictive. (In this he resembled his ...”

“... some are Audenish improbabilities which somehow come through. The only tedious poem is an elegy on Dylan Thomas. A few poems, including ‘Double Blind’ and ‘Discoverer’, are wonderfully true, and ‘The Nostalgist’ is everyone’s story who has reached a certain age. The nostalgist goes through his house: On step and rail the sunbeams slyly ...”

“... when I was replete With an ardor so powerful it was exact. Eberhart elsewhere pays tribute to Dylan Thomas, and comparisons with ‘Fern Hill’ may suggest themselves. But they only show the distance from Thomas’s self-intoxicated heavings. The lines instead retain what few poets in the tradition have affected ...”

“... he featured in and fed material to Private Eye. Introduced in his youth to Fitzrovia, he knew Dylan Thomas, Louis MacNeice and Julian Maclaren-Ross, and wrote with sufficient extra-historical purchase to make it into Margaret Drabble’s Oxford Companion to English Literature (to his immoderate delight). His memoirs were a Book at Bedtime. He ...”

“... of first, the then undergraduate Robert Kee and second, the egomaniacal and usually drunken Dylan Thomas. Even thirty years later, Taylor recalled this period as ‘a decade of intense, almost indescribable misery’, and it is impossible to contemplate the blighted hopes and bewildered children of this marriage without feeling great sympathy for ...”

“... Dalí, wearing a deep-sea diving suit, delivered a lecture about a student who eats a wardrobe; Dylan Thomas wandered through the crowd offering teacups full of boiled string; and Sheila Legge, her head stuck in a cage of roses, brandished a raw pork chop. Jennings, who had several pieces in the show, had written Surrealist prose-poems and translated ...”

“... threat posed by a sinister and nebulous enemy from the other side of the world. It could be Bob Dylan performing his ‘Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues’ (‘I discovered there was red stripes on the American flag’); but the year is 2002, and the song is ‘Talkin’ Al Kida Blues’ (‘Cuba’s our enemy, unless we need a prison camp’). Al Kida ...”

“... Milton, Pope, Dryden, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Browning, Tennyson, Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Auden, Dylan Thomas ... Graves also has an infuriating habit of rewriting other people’s poems – and even the whole of David Copperfield – to bring them closer to what he feels the White Goddess had in mind, in the process invariably ruining them. This ...”

“... in nearby pubs, such friends as Nancy Cunard, Lennox Berkeley, Roy Fuller, John Minton, Dylan Thomas, Julian Trevelyan and so on. Our Time and Theatre ‘Today, like Horizon, Poetry London and nearly every other wartime and immediately postwar journal of the arts, had collapsed by the Fifties; but even later, when I had moved to Bristol and ...”

“... connects his life to his work, as happens in Lowell or Berryman. Essentially Schwartz was, like Dylan Thomas, a dazzling phrasemaker. His first lines were usually his best, and these often became the poems’ titles: ‘Dogs are Shakespearean, Children are strangers’, ‘In the Naked Bed, in Plato’s Cave’, ‘The Beautiful American ...”

“... personal presence, fascination and power. Many of those who over the years have come to praise Dylan Thomas, for instance, have ended by doing something oddly like the opposite: to such an extent that it has become less easy than of old to read Yeats’s poem, ‘The Scholars’ – Lord, what would they say Did their Catullus walk that way? – in ...”