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“... forensic solecism in the Maigret books, he tends to rely for criticism on the judgments of Julian Symons and Maurice Richardson. This is probably wise – Mr Bresler arouses little confidence in his own literary footing. When, for instance, he quotes Simenon’s dictum about style – ‘If it rains, I write: “It rains” ’ – he seems ...”

“... consecutive novels about them.* Their debut in A Clubbable Woman (1970) came eight years after Julian Symons had first pronounced the ‘detective story’ dead; as late as 1989 T.J. Binyon, in Murder Will Out, though finding them ‘an impressive, interesting team’, gave them only two sentences under the heading ‘Provincial Policemen’. One ...”

“... including Cecil Day Lewis, John Pudney and G. Rostrevor Hamilton, as well as his close friend Julian Symons, the dedicatee of this book, and the poet’s poet son, John Fuller. There are some sympathetic pages about another neighbour, Bonamy Dobrée. But the extent of Fuller’s writerly acquaintance is much wider than this suggests; many a poet ...”

“... of the MP and journalist Horatio Bottomley, a fraudster whose victims, according to his biographer Julian Symons, often felt he ‘did not mean to do wrong’; a man fond of ‘the good life … of mistresses, champagne, gambling and entertaining’. He was best known for his magazine John Bull. Launched in 1906 following Bottomley’s election as the ...”

“... detects certain reticences) but from access to the poet’s long correspondence with his friend Julian Symons. That friendship, going back to pre-war years, makes one reflect on Fuller’s luck. He went to no university, was the product of a middle-class provincial childhood and education, and began adult life as an articled clerk in Blackpool – an ...”

“... establishing Russia as an inexhaustible source of fictional villains for the next two generations. Julian Symons in Bloody Murder dismissed the Fu Manchu tales as ‘absolute rubbish, penny dreadfuls in hard covers’, but John Mortimer was happy to include the fiend with ‘a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan’ in his Oxford Book of ...”

“... justified reactions to criticism was her impatience with the younger generation of critics such as Julian Symons, who came up in the 1940s and for whom she was an established figure. They attacked her as an ‘aristo’ who knew nothing of ‘real life’. It was a bad mistake, if understandably common. After 1945, when she had become well known in ...”

“... to use the story in one way or another, among them Trollope, Patrick White, Robin Maugham and Julian Symons, just as Dumas, and Boublil and Schönberg, have pounced on the story of Martin Guerre, and Verlaine, Georg Trakl and Peter Handke, not to mention a dozen playwrights and film-makers, have taken up the tale of Kaspar Hauser. These days the ...”

“... raise puerile and rhythmless voices,’ wrote Roy Fuller. ‘Infantile simplicity is all,’ wrote Julian Symons.What no one in the symposium quite manages to say, yet almost everyone darkly hints at, is that in 1972 the ‘Poundian revolution’ still looked as if it was carrying the world before it. Trailing in the long wake of The Waste Land, the ...”

“... on this occasion, depending more on hermeneutics than on ‘accommodation’; and according to Julian Symons,* who is part of the very past that Kermode was patiently reconstructing, he did not get it all quite right – did not know, for instance, what the ‘boiled orange’ was, in a Kenneth Allott poem. Then, what also amazes one – though of ...”

“... a gift for startling self-exposure: ‘The frankness seems almost deliberately self-lacerating,’ Julian Symons wrote. John Lehmann said he was ‘the most rapidly self-revealing person’ he had ever met. In an introductory note to the Collected Poems (1955), Spender admitted that he felt obliged to ‘own up’ to the poems of the 1930s that had become ...”

“... Dodsworth, guilty of ‘artistic parasitism’. In his capacity as Poet Laureate, according to Julian Symons, even ‘the task of producing semiofficial occasional poems that were also of poetic interest defeated him.’ The Times obituary summed him up in a phrase more appropriate for lamenting the death of a loyal and energetic dog than for the loss ...”

“... only disability is that idealism must fail in the end: the world refuses to be transformed. In ‘Julian and Maddalo’ Shelley deals with his misgiving by giving it a separate hearing. Keach aptly refers to ‘Julian’s belief in the power of mind to dissolve and transform all impediments to ideal self-realisation, and ...”

“... investigates Ellmann’s footnotes, and returns to his source, a letter from Turner to A.J.A. Symons, which speculates about Wilde’s early homosexuality, but does not refer to the Swan and Edgar incident. There have been at least three more versions of this episode since the Cambridge Companion went to press. Brian Gilbert’s film – which, rather ...”

“... fiction – most remarkably, perhaps, the novels of Peter Ackroyd, D.M. Thomas, Beryl Bainbridge, Julian Barnes and Thomas Keneally, whose Schindler’s Ark was marketed in America (under a slightly different title) as non-fiction and in Britain as a novel. Writers of light fiction, too, have added to the enrichment of their work by introducing people from ...”