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“... The Vision of that Ancient Man I was taking a piss when the dredger rode over our pleasure like a swan rogering its mate, and we all sank down-a-down. The porthole groaned and held ... the light went sick ... and eventually something shitty erupted out of the can and I was a dead man. But I lived. Unlike my mate I lived, and without her I can’t tell one thing from t’other ...”

“... I Almost time, and the sun at last round to her open classroom door. A dusty glowing bar tipped across desk-tops, paper, heads and basking her face and hair. She lets it dazzle a moment, arms folded, one shoe eased half-off, and the room dissolves. No drawing lesson. No children. No maps pinned low on the walls. No names. Just brilliant crude light swimming with flecks of chalk – the silence lasting and lasting and broken by Please, Miss ...”

“... a jar?’ I was six but I thought I knew what she meant. I had these friends, the Routledge twins: Andrew and Peter. My own two Christian names, as it happened, but divided up like that I didn’t recognise them as mine. Andrew was quiet and cautious, Peter quick and reckless. They lived on a mucky farm nearby; you turned ...”

“... R. George Thomas is a cautious man. His life of Edward Thomas (no relation) is ‘a portrait’ not ‘a biography’. Maybe this is just as well. The poet was a cautious man too. He was also a scrupulous one, and when we read in the first few pages that research for this book began ‘in the early 1960s’, we are encouraged to feel that author and subject are kindred spirits ...”

“... of the critics. He has never lacked actual readers. But anxiety about the need for such a book as Andrew Motion’s and the advisability of writing it at all is eased by the finished product. The recalcitrance of the subject remains; it is there from start to finish and is particularly obvious in the chapter ‘Double Vision’, where ...”

“... In 1982, at the age of 30, Andrew Motion, together with Blake Morrison, claimed attention in the Introduction to the Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry for the idea that ‘British poetry is once again undergoing a transition’: the new poets, many of them ‘Martians’, showed ‘a preference for metaphor and poetic bizarrerie to metonymy and plain speech’, and ‘a renewed interest in narrative ...”

“... among the rural poor under the name of Dr Cake? This scenario is both premise and précis of Andrew Motion’s novella, The Invention of Dr Cake. The action is the deduction of Dr Cake’s secret by the narrator, Dr Tabor. The book is presented in the form of documents supposedly written by Tabor and deposited in the archive of the Royal College of ...”

“... language (British English, American English) and born at nearly the same time (1952, 1951). One, Andrew Motion, is quite well-known in this country, though an unfamiliar name to most readers of verse in America. The other, Nicholas Christopher, is one of the most celebrated of America’s younger poets but – I suspect – an unknown figure in ...”

“... that most of Susan Hill is in the Susan Hill collection at Eton College Library, and that Andrew Motion wrote a letter to E.M. Forster in ‘?1970’ which is under ‘restricted access’ at King’s College Cambridge. But as a writer, listed – however laconically – in the catalogue, I pondered its two volumes with welling unease. The first ...”

“... alive’ these days by the careerist machinations of people like Craig Raine and Andrew Motion. Kenner is not writing specifically for an Australian audience but he is writing for an ignorant, or uninformed, readership which will be able to savour his liveliness of style without worrying too much about his scholarship. What slightly ...”

“... the poem from its own world.In this short book produced for the ‘Contemporary Writers’ series Andrew Motion has written the best biographical and critical study of Larkin so far. He understands his subject as a poet, as an admirer and to some extent a follower, who has also taken part in studies of the Movement group of poets ...”

“... translated out of dialect into Standard English with very little loss? Obviously it wasn’t up to Andrew Motion to make the experiment: reprinting the dialect poems, he had to reproduce the diacritical marks and phonetic spellings that Barnes insisted on in his lifetime. Yet these certainly impede the patient reader, and it’s still open to question ...”

“... nothing happen, then the poetry anthology has no such self-effacing qualms. Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion knew this, as did the predecessor they were tussling with, A. Alvarez’s The New Poetry (which was tussling with its predecessor, Robert Conquest’s New Lines). ‘This anthology,’ they wrote in their preface to the Penguin Book of ...”

“... out of two), Randall Garrison, Donald Stallybrass, Ellery Akers, Peter Abbs, John Hodgen, Andrew Motion, Edwin Drummond, Gregory Harrison, Gordon Mason and Robert Ballard, Isabel Nathaniel and Peter Didsbury, Anthony Edkins and Brian Cosgrove. Several get prizes, and in particular Andrew Motion gets the ...”

“... has been recently relaxed to ten years. Under the sponsorship of the Royal Society of Literature, Andrew Motion has launched a campaign to have the restriction lifted altogether and a ‘manuscripts tsar’ appointed. These reforms would, it is plausibly claimed, divert money away from the archival graveyards of literature to the workshops in which ...”