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“... are those quoted from the American buttons themselves: ‘Men are the ancestors of apes,’ ‘Ronald Reagan is a lesbian,’ ‘If it moves, fondle it.’ Lastly, to return to the issue of nationalism, there is a long poem here, too, ‘Story Under Full Sail’, a group of lyrics about a swashbuckling sea-captain Rezanov who, by marrying the daughter of ...”

“... I think it was Heal’s in Tottenham Court Road’. He made some changes to an article by Ronald Harwood but as to what they were: ‘I really can’t remember.’ This motif could be a useful technical device in another context but in this case it can only be a motive: to cut the great and famous down to size. It is difficult to catch the intended ...”

“... for chaps. Alsop (his very name announces that, like Leavis’s impossibly named favourite Ronald Bottrall, he could never make it in the canon) is not the English Horace. He is a Neo-Latin simulacrum of Horace. What is lacking in his writing is any live sense of inter-cultural stress: he has no difficulty in sounding like Horace while remaining ...”

“... their nights Composing articles that make you whistle, Since even Leavis’s worst panegyrics For Ronald Bottrall didn’t sound like lyrics? The dons are punished for their dereliction With dour gibes from the joyless Donald Davie Who demonstrates at length Sue’s vaunted diction Tastes thin compared with dehydrated gravy, While as for her alleged ...”

“... Leavis’s New Bearings in English Poetry where the way forward from Eliot is held to lie with Ronald Bottrall. To their credit, Eliot and Leavis did give some attention to MacDiarmid despite their political differences: but it was Edwin Muirrather than MacDiarmid who became canonised as a Faber Poet, and to understand his later poetry it is necessary ...”

“... and musical talk. Younger writers Leavis admired but turned against included William Empson and Ronald Bottrall, who had once been his ‘tips’ for the future of poetry; after Seven Types of Ambiguity, which was repeatedly praised, Empson began to seem less intelligent. A remarkably successful attempt on the part of his admirers to raise funds for a ...”

“... by his name, and rudely seizes me. It’s a powerfully assured and innovative voice within what Ronald Bottrall once described as the ‘colloquial tradition’ in English poetry. It has a thrusting flatness, equally free of gnarled Skeltonic overkill and of Rochesterian overheating (that charged conversational incandescence which Oldham sometimes ...”

“... on ‘Pity Me Not’; but there we go. I’m not sure which was which; but one of them I sent to Ronald Duncan at the Royal Court. Immense crowd scenes, people standing around, pitying the hero – i.e. me.It sounds very like Duncan.It was. This Way to the Tomb was his big play at the time. I liked that title.You say you also wrote a more overtly political ...”