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“... days he wears green spectacles, not reading The trouble is that, beyond the oblique references to Dylan Thomas and Yeats, the decadence of the imagery is bleeding from Godard to Dirk Bogarde camping it up in Losey’s Modesty Blaise. Time, no doubt, to move on to television. Godard’s Bande à part is name-checked in the poem ‘Variations’ from Nicht ...”

“... c’est lui. Writers must get tired of answering crass questions – and not only writers. Bob Dylan, when asked by a journalist what his songs were ‘about’, said: ‘Some of my songs are about four minutes, some are about five minutes and some, believe it or not, are about eleven or twelve.’ Bernard’s book is organised alphabetically, according to ...”

“... is the pastiche Auden; Auden’s influence was shared by the Golden Treasury, and superseded by Dylan Thomas and other romantics, Yeats becoming prime among them; and Yeats was finally driven out by Hardy. Yet even after the poet had found his style, he continued to write sometimes highly competent verses that didn’t, however, qualify to go into the ...”

“... The Guggenheim lot seem to have made mental instability a social requirement. So did people like Dylan Thomas, who saw White romantically as a wild animal kept safe ‘behind the suburban-zoo bars’. Henry Miller and Alfred Perles (who published some of White’s poems in their magazine the Booster) thought madness ‘a mysterious conundrum to be ...”

“... play of Merrill’s called The Bait. During a soliloquy ‘heads swivelled as “Arthur Miller and Dylan Thomas … stumbled out,”’ ‘passing judgment’, as Hammer puts it, ‘with their feet’. ‘I learned what Mr Miller, with uncanny insight, had whispered in Dylan’s ear shortly after the curtain ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... on bread and fish, directing his reputation, mingling with the Celtic showmen Oscar Wilde and Dylan Thomas, with Dickens of the spittoons and Trollope of the politicians, with the missile makers in New Mexico and the clever German Jewish Left clustered unhappily around Hollywood, retailing the old world and its soft wisdom to the new. When the war ...”

“... to Paris he abandoned both his mother tongue – and, with it, the Joycean extravagance of what Dylan Thomas called his ‘Sodom and Begorrah’ mode – and the brilliant procrusteanism of his avant-garde writing of the Thirties. Writing now in French, he produced the four nouvelles and the trilogy of Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, books in ...”

“... bother him. But there are interesting moments when he takes a moral position; for example, when Dylan Thomas, who annoyed him by making assumptions about his relationship with Spender, irritated him further by boasting how well he, Thomas, had done out of a visit to Peter Watson to touch him for money. ‘I thought ...”

“... That’ll answer them. Herbert has influenced poets from Henry Vaughan and Richard Crashaw to Dylan Thomas and Geoffrey Hill. And not only poets; reading Herbert has made converts, even in modern times. While reciting ‘Love (III)’, the famous last poem in The Temple, Simone Weil felt that ‘Christ himself descended and took possession of ...”

“... Then early in 1945, sick of the war and of Bunny, she went with her daughter to stay in Wales with Dylan and Caitlin Thomas. After a brief period of peaceful country life, during which Dylan took her ‘very much under his wing’, a neighbour with more conventional views of sexual ...”

“... of homosexual fellatio’. Then he cools us down. ‘That is to move too far ahead.’ Thomas Carlyle, another prodigious filler of shelves, reckoned that ‘the history of the world is but the biography of great men.’ The pathos formula perfected by Ackroyd. Carlyle did not enjoy such a smooth passage. ‘Swimming in the Mother of Dead Dogs, and ...”

“... public intellectual in America’, and when challenged on this by a white journalist called Dylan Byers, responded as if there was no possible justification for Byers’s disagreement: I came up in a time when white intellectuals were forever making breathless pronouncements about their world, about my world, and about the world itself. My life was ...”

“... of the worst thing you could do’. And here is Hardwick at the public library discovering Thomas Mann, whose Death in Venice has been mis-shelved in the murder mystery section. (A lesser woman would have put it back.) In 1934, she went to the University of Kentucky, where she sought out ‘the literary people and the political people’. ‘I have a ...”

“... the arts because of its unpredictability. There were even signs that he envied the early death of Dylan Thomas, who ‘never stopped beginning; sink or sin,//Doubles or quits, he dared the passing bell/To pass him and it did.’ Being a true poet, Thomas punctuated his life and work with fresh starts, and his death ...”