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“... of the Soviet Union might be seen as a further strand in his continuing argument with Tom Paulin over The Faber Book of Political Verse. On the one hand, Raine here shows himself to be a writer who can step out of the domestic tunnel into the stadium of politics and history. He takes Pasternak’s novella The Last Summer, set in 1916 with ...”

“... will be there with a big tarpaulin to catch him.’ In his poem ‘A Belfast Bildungsroman’, Tom Paulin, who was raised in Northern Ireland, looks forward to that great and notable day when the curtain goes up on a stagestruck city soughing like a full house For the time being, though, a discernible lessening of troop and police activity on the ...”

“... socialist that he is, in the unthinkable position of finding some good to say for Ezra Pound. Like Tom Paulin, who is also in the Annual, Lucas thinks he can be élitist in education (what he’s professionally concerned with) while remaining ‘progressive’ and egalitarian in matters further outside his ken. I don’t have to declare my interest, for ...”

“... of this? At one level, it looks like deliberate self-marginalisation. No doubt those who, like Tom Paulin (London Review, 1982), have found in Paisley’s writing the typical autodidact’s ‘combination of earnest pride and deep lack of confidence’ have a point. But this is not merely a matter of individual psychology. Insofar as Paisley ...”

“... poetry and political concerns are incompatible. In fact, they are inseparable: it hardly needed Tom Paulin to remind us that the subtext in Larkin, even when his subject was horses at grass, rarely strayed far from the political decline of England.’ Later, in a sudden frenzy, they claim that ‘Carol Ann Duffy’s work is written out of a conviction ...”

“... about the real living conditions of workers and domestics on an 18th-century landed estate? For Tom Paulin, ‘the British heritage industry is a loathsome collection of theme parks and dead values.’ For Patrick Wright, it is ‘part of the self-fulfilling culture of national decline’. As their country’s importance in the world diminishes, the ...”

“... details to the third generation. Berk’s Peerage, or the Variorum Donsiad. On page 3 lolls Tom Paulin, clad in nothing but the Report of the New Ireland Forum. I wake in a lather, and have to shave. Cold and obsessive city. This morning, as I made for the station, they passed me on every side, the earnest, furrow-browed young, muttering ...”

“... intriguingly disruptive of the meta-narrative. Northern writing is otherwise well-represented. Tom Paulin edits a section on ‘Northern Protestant Oratory and Writing 1791-1985’, which includes Drennan, Cooke, Carson, Craig, Paisley, and Orange Toasts from 1795. Northern writing is also well-represented in fiction, poetry, drama, autobiography and ...”

“... to rest in Tyneham Churchyard where so many of his old friends, his grandparents and his Uncle Tom already lay in shell-shocked repose. But Wilson followed the advice of his civil servants and the Army kept its range. Thus did the labour Party lose its solitary Tyneham supporter. John Gould joined the Liberal Party in disgust, and the campaign dwindled ...”

“... Maydeston.’ He thus contributes to the oratory of Protestant dissent which Ted Hughes and Tom Paulin have both evoked as a lost – or at least neglected – strand of the national tradition. Bale blazoned his desiderata as much as he reviled the objects of his contempt. The Princess Elizabeth embodied all he hoped for. In his Conclusion, she ...”

“... a libel; it greatly disturbed some of his contemporaries and still disturbs people now. Tom Paulin on Late Review said things about the pictures at the National Gallery which would have won the agreement of conservative commentators in pre-1900 Paris, although they, looking back to Degas’s earlier work, would have said that the women, not the ...”

“... and brawny, whereas southern ones are more devious and deliquescent. The Northern Irish poet Tom Paulin, with his penchant for words which sound like the squelching of a leaky boot, raises this doctrine to the point of self-parody. In poetry like Heaney’s, you can hear the pluck and slop of brackish water as the signs button down snugly on their ...”

“... in somebody’s eye. Of the many English versions (Robert Lowell, Jeremy Reed, Jonathan Galassi, Tom Paulin and so on), McKendrick rightly chooses Paul Muldoon’s. Inseparably inventive and close, his ‘Eel’ is like its namesake: it departs from its origin only as a way of returning to it. At one point, Muldoon sends the eel ‘to some green and ...”

“... scribbled in airports? In a review of Elizabeth Bishop’s letters, Heaney’s Field Day colleague Tom Paulin argued that ‘a poetics does operate when we read a letter,’ but that ‘the gifted correspondent has to appear negligent of effect.’ What successful letters show is ‘a rejection of rhetoric in the interests of ...”

“... even John Arden could be included in his list of Marginal Men (and Women); Foster himself and Tom Paulin, to whom the book is dedicated, could easily join the ranks of Micks on the Make. (Paulin, however, also has some Marginal credentials.) Not to speak of Ronan Bennett. Foster makes the point that Robert ...”