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“... published three scarcely known books of verse. In her shrewd and elegant introduction to the Spy, Gillian Hughes points out that by 1809 Hogg had been rejected by his own community, who distrusted his poetic pretensions, and, knowing that he had failed at farming, refused him work as a shepherd. Cold-shouldered by the people he had grown up with, he ...”

“... Tales became the title of a solitary volume, which now takes its place, skilfully edited by Gillian Hughes, in the current Collected Works. Conceived as the first book of a dozen in which Hogg would ‘give the grave and gay tales, the romantic and the superstitious, alternately, as far as is consistent with the size of each volume’, Altrive ...”

“... Afterglow of Abbotsford: John Macrone, Celebrity Culture and Commemoration’, in which Gillian Hughes, a biographer of Hogg’s deeply cognisant of the literary culture and daily life of the Romantic period, does what the rest of the compilation does not: gives body to the elusive figure of Macrone. He seems, she writes, ‘a typical ...”

“... of polemical biography: it is good to have the relationship between the two poets, Plath and Hughes, treated mainly in literary terms. Yet the account of Plath’s poetry, especially that written in 1962 and 1963 when she had separated from Hughes, is thin, and relies heavily on descriptive paraphrase. Plath made the ...”

“... comment on themselves and on other texts. An early poem, ‘Plague Graves’, signals a debt to Hughes and speaks of litter being destroyed when                           Sheep maul beyond recognition alarmingly quickly the sandwich-paper memorials left by charabanc trippers, dissolving all tangible trace of us. Very soon in ...”

“... often come from knowing oneself part of a historical or geographical community of voices. Gillian Allnutt is aware of this in her selection of ‘Quote Feminist Unquote Poetry’ in The New British Poetry. Her introduction steers clear of claiming that there is yet any discernible ‘tradition’ in this area, yet she feels at least that ‘it is now ...”

“... sights set lower and horizons diminished. There were, and still are, alternatives to Larkin. Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney and Tony Harrison are powerfully present in these books, as are a number of the poets Motion and Morrison published in Contemporary British Poetry: Douglas Dunn, Anne Stevenson, Craig Raine, James Fenton, Andrew ...”

“... own poems. When Kemp first sees and then actually meets the double of Jill, a real girl called Gillian, who turns out to be the cousin of his room-mate’s girl, his personality, already meagre, seems to take leave of the reader, and after a symbolic consummation he is thrown into a fountain by her friends, catches a severe chill, and collapses in the ...”