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“... has been, to say nothing of many a lesser figure. In what might be called the peripheral stakes Dylan Thomas and even David Jones have had more attention in some quarters – in the case of Dylan Thomas, with a wild publicity which has had little enough to do with his ...”

“... than a handful of people had access to more than a handful of songs by any country bluesman. Bob Dylan got an acetate from his producer, John Hammond, and played it for his mentor, Dave Van Ronk. (‘He didn’t think Johnson was very original,’ Dylan reported. ‘I knew what he meant, but I thought just the ...”

“... Magdalen College. Again his teachers were splendid, he had Jack Bennett for Anglo-Saxon and Emrys Jones for Shakespeare. I’m sure he spent many hours in the Bodleian, but more on the rugby pitch. In Singing School he doesn’t mention his literary prizes, but he gives the scores of the rugby matches in which he played and quotes favourable reviews of his ...”

“... the great issues of our time. In The Great War and Modern Memory he quotes with enthusiasm David Jones’s dodgy-sounding dictum that ‘the artist in man is the infantryman in man ... all men are aboriginally of this infantry, though not all serve with this infantry ... continued employment “away from the front” has made habitual and widespread a ...”

“... Beatty – who produced the film as well as starring in it – had originally wanted Bob Dylan to play the role of Clyde. As for Dunaway, Bonnie was a braless rebel in a tam o’ shanter. Apart from their crimes, the real Bonnie and Clyde were not so very rebellious, as Jeff Guinn’s admirably thorough biography shows. Right to the bloody end, and ...”

“... essayism she understood extremes.’ He makes a meal of one particular sentence (the subject is Dylan Thomas): ‘He died, grotesquely like Valentino, with mysterious weeping women at his bedside.’ Sonically, musically, it is a straightforwardly beautiful sentence: the rhyme and more between ‘died’ and ‘bedside’, the ‘i’s in ...”

“... Loving Bewick was made on a piece of transfer paper that her collaborator, the printmaker Stanley Jones, had kept in a drawer for three decades. ‘We haven’t had such a good transfer in years,’ he said later.) Wood GalleryThe current retrospective at Tate Britain (until 24 October) shows – in its scale, its curatorial arc and its popularity – what ...”

“... he featured in and fed material to Private Eye. Introduced in his youth to Fitzrovia, he knew Dylan Thomas, Louis MacNeice and Julian Maclaren-Ross, and wrote with sufficient extra-historical purchase to make it into Margaret Drabble’s Oxford Companion to English Literature (to his immoderate delight). His memoirs were a Book at Bedtime. He received the ...”

“... Rotten or Sid Vicious, eclipsing the group’s musical muscle: drummer Paul Cook, guitarist Steve Jones and bassist Glen Matlock. (It was Matlock who wrote nearly all the group’s best tunes, only to be pushed out for being a Beatles-loving middle-class namby.) Andrew Loog Oldham, who managed the Rolling Stones, was the crucial precursor in grasping that bad ...”

“... with a local duchess strongly suggest a rather comfortable style of rebellion. Little wonder that Dylan Thomas, who came across the Out of Bounds group in the mid-1930s, thought they had ‘no idea of what they priggishly call “the class struggle” … They are bogus from skull to navel.’ The sequel to the elopement and marriage was marked by ...”

“... Dalí, wearing a deep-sea diving suit, delivered a lecture about a student who eats a wardrobe; Dylan Thomas wandered through the crowd offering teacups full of boiled string; and Sheila Legge, her head stuck in a cage of roses, brandished a raw pork chop. Jennings, who had several pieces in the show, had written Surrealist prose-poems and translated Breton ...”

“... etymological ones. The word-play shows how far this Welsh poet lies from R.S. Thomas, if not from Dylan. There is no solemn stuff about belonging, no smack of loam or pit-dirt. If the use of language as subject-matter recalls Heaney in Wintering Out, the jokey juxtaposition of national matters and erotic ones is more like Paul Muldoon. ‘Pobl y Cwm’, for ...”

“... Stones. There is a certain amount of minor-key keening around the ‘mysterious’ death of Brian Jones, but that story circulates very much as a cautionary tale rather than an airy fable, all too humanly squalid, with nothing mythic or fantastical about it. (Even a lowlife encyclopedist like myself emerges from any time spent reading about ...”

“... for Who’s Who) in positions of power in publishing-houses; our true literary talents – David Jones, Basil Bunting, Charles Tomlinson and Geoffrey Hill – not forming a group, as they should, and in any case not read; and the food on British railways simply terrible (page 238: ‘Have you travelled on a British Railway? Gagged on its unthinkable ...”

“... 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 never ...”