“... 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 ...”

“... sort through her papers, and rush round when anything went wrong. He brought her recordings of Dylan Thomas (reading Nightwood) and James Joyce – she had never seen a tape-recorder before. After his meetings with her he wrote a diary – published as Life is Painful, Nasty and Short (1990) – in which he would report the conversations they had just ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... project a diffused self-portrait onto four well-known cultural figures who had been his friends (Dylan Thomas, George Orwell, Eric Gill and John Middleton Murry), evoking them first separately and then in some slightly dizzying comparisons: I had seen Murry working, happily absorbed and with real skill, mending fences, sawing up logs (once, too ...”

“... project was a live one, working hard, after paying its respects, to defuse the purple excesses of Thomas De Quincey’s On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts. This is P.D. James at her best; the fastidious dabbling in horror, the forensic eye finding order in chaos. Now, 22 years later, with the oven-ready blockbuster, Original Sin, she returns to ...”

“... It was written sometime between 1939 and 1941 – Capote was born in 1924 – to his schoolmate Thomas Flanagan. Flanagan kept it all his life. It read: ‘I do hereby solemnly affirm that any statements I may have made about Thomas Flanagan, or said that he had made, were calumnies and lies on my part. Truman ...”

“... and varieties of rhyme. It isn’t surprising to find mimicry of Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Dylan Thomas. But what really vitiates the earliest poems isn’t their mimicry but a lack of ruthlessness in the service of accuracy. The young poet tries biblical fancifulness (butterflies are ‘Priests of the golden sun, dancing because/the sun says to ...”

“... moved. A frightening Build-a-Bear arrived from my publicist. The ceremony I had come for (the Dylan Thomas Prize) came and went without me; I actually won, which seemed like the funniest outcome. Caspian, my agent, showed up in the lobby one morning with a crystal book and a cheque, and Jason and I laughed at our reflections in the gold elevator as ...”

“... demanding to be loved, the simultaneous apathy towards the feelings of others, are reminiscent of Dylan Thomas, that other priapic show-off descending on London from an Anglo-Celtic metropolis, except that the earlier incarnation seems to have consummated his amours more often than the later, and didn’t to his credit go in very much for ...”

“... Francisco Poetry Center in order to establish a reading series (a recent phenomenon popularised by Dylan Thomas) and archive. Auden stayed with Ruth Witt-Diamant, the Poetry Center’s founding director, and, in return for his considerable largesse, asked only that he be delivered to gay bars where he might meet young Jewish American males with blond ...”

“... these letters (Shakespeare, Marlowe, Herbert, Donne, Marvell, Fielding, Coleridge, Joyce, Orwell, Dylan Thomas), had in his view found ways to resist religious conformity (religion and politics for Empson are virtually inextricable from each other). They give voice to the personal conflicts of their times, not to their resolutions. But they do not ...”

“... and every other key figure in the movement. André Breton, dressed all in green, opened the show. Dylan Thomas circulated with a cup of string asking guests if they liked it weak or strong and Salvador Dalí nearly suffocated while giving a lecture in a diving suit. Practical considerations forced Comyns to give up painting and sculpture but when she ...”

“... a writer’s style without losing the grain. A few weeks ago, we were discussing the poetry of Dylan Thomas. ‘Which of the poems do you like?’ he asked.‘The one about the fields.’‘“Do Not Go Gently Into Those Good Fields”?’‘Very funny.’‘Which one, then?’‘The one about the farm.’‘“Fern Hill,”’ he said. ‘Will you ...”

“... a hundred or so well-known authors from 54 countries, not including Isabel Allende, Bob Dylan or Gabriel García Márquez, who admirably declined to vote. The Guardian did a vox pop. New Puritan about town Nicholas Blincoe rather proudly let slip that he’s read 81 of the top 100; smashing Mark Lawson (69) into a measly second place. ‘I think the ...”