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“... and ephemeral’. Withers, like Todd, was more interested in writers and artists than clothes: Dylan Thomas, Kingsley Amis, Bertrand Russell and Simone de Beauvoir all wrote for Vogue under her editorship and she ran features on Gore Vidal, Isherwood, Bacon, Freud and Matisse. She employed Elizabeth David to write on food. And she was a socialist. Her ...”

“... turned away from his earlier uncertain styles, which were close enough to Auden and Yeats and Dylan Thomas to be called vaguely Modernist, even faintly distractive. The speech he found was in direct contrast: a weighty, easy and conversable social intimacy, occasionally spoken of later by critics in terms of the British bar parlour. And ...”

“... aid I would hardly be a human being.’ He asked Cyril Connolly never again to invite him to meet Dylan Thomas. ‘He’s exactly what I would have been if I had not been a Catholic.’ He would ask his friends how it was possible for him to deny the existence of evil in the world when there was so much evil in himself. His self-hatred was deadly. He ...”

“... appearance in Tippins’s book, starting with William Dean Howells and Stephen Crane, up through Thomas Wolfe, and on to anyone you care to name, sliding to an elegant halt with Joseph O’Neill, author of Netherland. Largely it’s the names, not the work. You almost get the impression that Arthur Miller might have written After the Fall there, but it was ...”

“... delights to be found in Roger Lonsdale’s New Oxford Book of 18th-Century Verse is a squib by Thomas Holcroft, provoked by some disparaging remarks Voltaire made about Shakespeare. In fact, Voltaire was perfectly ready to concede that Shakespeare was possessed of real genius, though of a rough and ready kind, but in denying that he had ‘so much as a ...”

“... that follow were indeed first spoken by Democritus. In his 1989 book on plagiarism, Stolen Words, Thomas Mallon excoriated the academic special pleading that elevated Sterne and Coleridge from literary shoplifters into masters of bricolage and intertextuality. Their cases are analysed along with that of the Victorian novelist Charles Reade, and the American ...”

“... meandered Forward from Liberalism, crabwise; Sybil Thorndike joined the board of the Daily Worker; Dylan Thomas insisted that his ‘Ceremony after a Fire Raid’ must first appear as part of a socialist Mayday feature in 1944. Doris Lessing, so she now claims, grew hysterical; Clough, who briefly belonged to Jimmy Maxton’s Independent Labour ...”

“... was Grosz ‘driven by a need to capture the exploitation of the proletariat on paper’. Like Bob Dylan, Buruma writes, Grosz moved quickly from being a protest artist to a ‘song and dance man’. In his little book on Grosz, Mario Vargas Llosa similarly claims him for liberalism. Like Orwell, Llosa writes, he ‘was not a social artist … Grosz’s work ...”

“... book, about his childhood, are written in a strain of hyperbole, sometimes as pleasingly Welsh as Dylan or Gwyn Thomas. Before we reach the third section, about his pre-war adventures among Arabs, Cubans and Sicilians, we have been astonished by his weird boyhood in Carmarthen and Enfield, where his experiences seem ...”

“... by helping to form Lowell, by helping him to find a movement for his verse once the Hopkins and Dylan Thomas influences had subsided. Frost’s dualistic prosody – with its tension between metrical regularity and the emphases of the speaking voice – was meant to impart to poems ‘the sound of sense’. This sound is heard again in Lowell: the iamb ...”

“... Thanks to​ the work of Norman Cohn, Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Keith Thomas and others, we have, over the past few years, acquired a lot of information about millenarianism as a social and historical force. The belief that the end is nigh, or that a new series of times is about to begin, is very ancient, but it is also modern ...”

“... at all. And she is good at describing that great tradition of our literature, from Caedman to R.S. Thomas, which transforms the parochial into the universal. A highly literate Church has not limited itself to the Word, but has scribbled its brilliant way into drama, poetry, science and fiction. Miss Drabble’s map is sign-posted all over with cloisters and ...”

“... has battened off Brydan, an ambiguously-gifted Welsh poet with something of the mythic status of Dylan Thomas; now there is nothing in his work but second-rate Brydan: ‘If I say it’s too much like Brydan I mean not just Brydan himself but a whole way of writing, and I suppose thinking, that concentrates on the writer and draws attention to the ...”

“... both famous and infamous, and famous not for a few minutes but for ever. Three centuries later, Thomas Carlyle will write that but for you there would have been no French Revolution, no America. This is what happened not in a dream but metaphorically to Martin Luther, a hitherto obscure monk and professor of theology in an undistinguished university ...”

“... some, all this exposure, combined with a move to a ‘mainstream’ publisher, has been like Bob Dylan going electric, but it represents an opportunity for the most radically innovative poet now writing to extend his readership. Prynne has been compared with John Ashbery, but there is little of Ashbery’s canny slackness of tone or perspective. The ...”