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“... Vernon Scannell is not the first British poet to have been keen on boxing and, apparently, quite good at it: we may think of Lord Byron and Robert Graves. But few others, surely, have written and worried so concernedly about the ethics of this sport, its moral justification. Ring of Truth, his first novel since The Big Time in 1965, returns hungrily to Scannell’s old problem ...”

“... sensibility. Lines from the poems select images very like those the photographers looked for: Vernon Scannell (‘The tight-lipped woman who, accompanied/By all she knows of love on leather leash’), Tony Harrison (‘In each of our Blackpool photos from those years/and, I’ll bet, in every family’s South Pier snap’) and Philip Larkin (‘We ...”

“... to the Collected Works, and preferably the one in paperback that came out earlier this year*; or Vernon Scannell’s pamphlet written for the British Council in 1963. In any case, one always wonders about the readership of a work that started life as an academic thesis, once it has gone beyond the supervisor, the examiners and the people on the list of ...”

“... I think I’ve always had that side to myself, which many of my friends deprecate. When I told Vernon Scannell that I’d had some poems translated into German, his reply was ‘I thought they were in German already.’ The relationship of eloquence to obscurity in Porter’s later work is revealingly glossed in a New Statesman piece he wrote about ...”