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“... the streets, using all our senses, as well as spending time in archives, and the editors here – Simon Gunn, Peter Mandler and Otto Saumarez Smith – clearly told their contributors something similar. Like its predecessor, this collection is variable but sparkly, travelling down scholarly alleyways and shooting light into one forgotten corner after ...”

“... dilemmas’ precisely because tolerance of difference has kept subject peoples in their place. Gunn and Vernon’s volume is so different as to reinforce the suspicion that social historians’ seeming convergence is only skin deep. Feldman and Lawrence claim that ‘no one’ now writes ‘as though a single, overarching structure might provide the key to ...”

“... while Basil Bunting, Dylan Thomas, Edwin Morgan, R.S. Thomas, Iain Crichton Smith, Thom Gunn, Hugh MacDiarmid and Norman MacCaig are unassailably part of our consciousness of the poetic landscape. Auden and MacNeice, too, though the omission in both books of Stephen Spender suggests that he has slipped out of contention – either because his true ...”

“... sonnet, could apply equally well to its own powers of compression. Rule-bound and page-limited – Simon Rae’s introduction to News that Stays News: The 20th Century in Poems compares editing an anthology to doing a crossword puzzle – the Norton’s two volumes manage to give readers ‘infinite riches in a little room’. Little, but expanding. Like its ...”

“... of this fact, refers to him as ‘the Assyrian’ in his letters. He liked nicknames. Sir John Simon was ‘the Impeccable’. Jack Seeley ‘the Arch Colonel’. Montagu’s suit was hampered by a proviso of his father’s will: he would forfeit most of his inheritance if he married a gentile. In the end Venetia was ‘converted’. They were married in ...”

“... like silence,’ it begins) was released in 1965, on Bringing It All Back Home, the same year as Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘Sound of Silence’, which includes the line: ‘The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls.’ I don’t know which was written first, or if they were written quite independently, and it doesn’t matter – after ...”

“... woman’s flat’: ‘I washed my hands and the smell lasted for two days.’At the end of 1960 Simon Raven wrote a remarkable piece for Encounter on male prostitutes in London, distinguishing five types with the alert eye of a Mayhew addressing an undescribed trade. He deduces that all come from homes where they were unwanted or misunderstood. There are ...”

“... beyond help. The impression one gets of him from biographies and from Joyce’s descriptions of Simon Dedalus, the character based on his father in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, is of a patriarch who is such a dominating, magnetic and boastful presence that it is hard to imagine any son finding space beside him. It was never clear what being a ...”