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“... We have seen this pebble before Though three feet under. From year To year it changes position. The sea dwindles its contours But not to my brief eye In a mere decade of watching. Stone keeps its secrets. Its smoothness is a ruse To content us with surface. At the heart of stone is pure Concentration, which life Is foolishly in love with. We believe that the stillness comes From its exact possession Of a truth that is lost to us ...”

“... You and I, when our days are done, must say Without exactly saying it, goodbye. If we could choose at such a time one free Embodiment which might, by being the last, Stand in the account somehow as one Generous entry putting the whole in credit, What and where would it be, that final choice? There are times such as when we have had them Must serve in their completeness for the fancy, For they are all we get ...”

“... different kinds of inability to act: these are the overt themes of many of the poems in John Fuller’s inventive new volume. The title, Lies and Secrets, does not belong to any one poem, but is a warning that no statement found in the book should be relied on either for straightforwardness or for a disclosure of the whole truth. Stories are ...”

“... of character in fiction; David Caute harks back to the Sixties and the heyday of radical hopes; John Fuller conjures a world in which stories can still enchant. But these novelists are all, in their respective ways, nervous about the power of fiction to enthrall, and they live on the frontiers of representation, constantly checking their ...”

“... One of Roy Fuller’s ‘Quatrains of an Elderly Man’ is called ‘Poetry and Whist’: How enviable Herrick’s Fourteen hundred lyrics!   Though, as the Scot complained when they dealt him all The trumps, a lot of them were small. The envy seems unjustified, for Fuller must have written far more than 1400 lyrics – indeed there are more than that in the Collected Poems of 1985, with dozens more to come ...”

“... Seven years ago Roy Fuller published the third volume of his memoirs, which covered his life up to the end of the war. Reviewing it in this journal, I lamented his decision to stop there and called for a continuation, ‘all about the Woolwich, the Arts Council, the BBC and Oxford, with incidental observations on the conduct of the young, the remembered follies of youth, the tiresome defects of old age, and so forth ...”

“... Eliot himself provided, if not a commentary, useful notes upon The Waste Land, and an Oxford don, John Fuller, has written an excellent commentary on Auden’s poems. In the case of a text written in an ancient language, a commentary is particularly useful. The Greeks themselves had started to write commentaries on Greek poems as early as the fourth ...”

“... thing, start doing poetry and prose that is nothing but ‘poetry’ and ‘prose’. This is what John Fuller’s new rhymes for children are: they announce their literariness and children can no doubt admire it, for in this context they know, like older readers on the poetry scene, what is proper to it. But Walter de la Mare’s line ‘Who ...”

“... got their first chance in that pub. A few of the celebrants are, or have been, English dons – John Fuller, Simon Gray, Dan Jacobson; but even they arrived by what might be called the bohemian route. There are of course other ways in; anybody can see how much space the dons occupy in the respectable papers and magazines. Many moved in by routes that ...”

“... Gosse (the Father of Father and Son), who had his work for ever upstaged by The Origin of Species; John Churton Collins, a good journalist and scholar for ever cruelly ‘placed’ by one harsh Tennysonian snub; and Eliza Lynn Lynton, an early – too early – feminist. All are persons whose failure in life foreshadows that final shelving that time carries ...”

“... Trevor’s Tom and David Profumo’s James are simply – or not quite simply – innocents. John Fuller’s Hugh Howard, in Tell it me again, is much older – in his late forties – but acceptably an innocent abroad. Abroad is America. Hugh is an English composer, talented and successful, but a bit of a cold fish. In this sense, ...”

“... to do without ‘misogynist satire, self-congratulation, smut’. He has left these to the other John, whose anthology is bold, noisy, rude, aggressive and full of itself, all of which things love can be, too, given half a chance. Neither editor is taking any chances, though. Fuller’s book, which has a long and elegant ...”

“... in the opening chorus of The Dog beneath the Skin. These poems belong to a time when Auden was, as John Fuller puts it, ‘unafraid of magnificence’. Many years later, when he had repudiated that sort of magnificence, he discovered that he needed Collett again, and, after a successful search for a copy of The Changing Face of England, wrote ‘In Praise ...”

“... to ornament with appropriate curlicues the exposition of order and harmony in a poem like Sir John Davies’s Orchestra. In what might be called the new decorated style, or modern Elizabethan, the decoration has become an end in itself, serving only to embellish the sense of time passing, water dripping, bells ringing, clothes flying on the line. There is ...”

“... than Emerson could reasonably have expected when she wrote it. Flying to Nowhere is announced as John Fuller’s ‘first work of adult fiction’. It rather comes at the reader from all directions. The author is best-known as an English poet, the narrative is set in Wales with a strong folkloric element, and its publication is subsidised by the ...”