“... by love, as in Romans 6:9 where death ‘hath no more dominion’, a tyrant deposed by Christ. Dylan Thomas made a poem from this bit of scripture, joined to the hope that ‘Though lovers be lost love shall not’ – a secular prayer also given expression in Larkin’s ‘An Arundel Tomb’. Among extinction’s consolations, the fiction of the afterlife ...”

“... with a local duchess strongly suggest a rather comfortable style of rebellion. Little wonder that Dylan Thomas, who came across the Out of Bounds group in the mid-1930s, thought they had ‘no idea of what they priggishly call “the class struggle” … They are bogus from skull to navel.’ The sequel to the elopement and marriage was marked by ...”

“... aid I would hardly be a human being.’ He asked Cyril Connolly never again to invite him to meet Dylan Thomas. ‘He’s exactly what I would have been if I had not been a Catholic.’ He would ask his friends how it was possible for him to deny the existence of evil in the world when there was so much evil in himself. His self-hatred was deadly. He never ...”