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“... frustration are not opposed attitudes or states of mind. In Miroslav Holub’s Czechoslovakia; the poet and the critic know that the act of writing is both necessary and absurd. This is the sharp, precise point of ‘Swans in Flight’, where the swans circle ‘and that means that Fortinbras’s army is approaching. That Hamlet will be saved and that an extra ...”

“... they explain and comment upon and summarise it. And, like the type of epigram which it seems this poet prefers, they resist the autonomy and self-enclosure of the brief, pithy kind in favour of a more open-ended quality and a visible sense of being part of the surrounding life. They become, in another word used in the title-poem, ‘annotations’. And this ...”

“... authorial hand and appearing twice in the other in the company of James Fenton. To be a love poet is a matter of tone, then, not of personality. The men in John Whitworth’s book ‘go in like whippets’ ‘for fearsome thrashes’ and ‘noholds barred’ – phrases from a single Kingsley Amis poem – and the vocabulary which describes them is ...”

“... reflective of the diverse poetries of the last twenty or so years. His brief introductions to each poet are also bibliographically useful, critically independent and sometimes funny (he describes C.H. Sisson as ‘an acquired taste’ who seems ‘inclined to warn off many who might acquire it’). Neither book rewrites the history of postwar poetry, and each ...”

“... to launch the careers of arts journalists including Laura Cumming and Kate Kellaway, and the poet CarolRumens. Members of staff at a particularly low financial ebb might be put up rent free in his flat. The Academy Club, which Attallah founded at Waugh’s request in the tiny basement of the Literary Review’s ...”

“... it grows wider every year – between what Philip Larkin calls ‘being a writer’, or ‘being a poet’, and managing to write something which will delight or amaze people without their having to respond to it in the context of poets and writers. Religion and other activities used to concentrate an audience by figuring in a non-literary context, and Blake ...”

“... so easily avoided, however, and in this area the attempt to do so lands you in further trouble. A poet can be at once Spanish and Colombian, say: but a poet from Northern Ireland might either be proud to be British or else resent the label, though in neither case would he mind being, as Keats hoped to be, ‘among the ...”