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“... In the poem which provides John Wain with the title of this book Yeats is addressing the dead Gore-Booth sisters and telling them, quite tenderly at first, that now they’re dead they know it all – all the folly of a fight For a common wrong or right – so that it seems dying has enabled them to catch up with him, for he knew it and stayed alive ...”

“... when we would like to know just how much inventing has been done. Did Philip Larkin really say of John Wain: ‘No advantage of birth or position or looks or talent – nothing, and look where he is now’? If I was John Wain, I would want to be sure of the exact words. According to Amis, ...”

“... when the whole company of Angry Young Men was assembled. Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin and John Wain knew one another at Oxford, but had little to do with autodidacts like Colin Wilson, John Osborne and Alan Sillitoe – this last name less often mentioned in this context than might have been expected, doubtless ...”

“... these 16 years, and although his voice was often recorded it now seems difficult to describe it. John Haffenden says he had one voice for poetry and another for prose. Empson himself thought ‘the reader should throw himself into the verse, and not do it with “reserved” English good taste.’ The best idea was to ham it ‘like a provincial Shakespeare ...”

“... is poignant and strong. There is a slight wobble of intention evident in the blurb of and John Wain’s own prefatory note to Where the rivers meet. The blurb calls it ‘the first of three projected books on the life of Oxford from the 1930s to the present day’, while Wain writes ‘the fact that its ...”

“... Spectator where he found the famous pieces by J.D. Scott and Anthony Hartley, or the scripts of John Wain’s Third Programme magazine First Reading, or copies of the Reading limited editions of Wain and Amis. Mr Morrison claims to have eschewed gossip and attended instead to such questions as: ‘Did the writers ...”

“... any other audience’. Thus it defied Reith’s doctrine of a BBC-unified culture, and Sir John was heard to protest. For less exalted reasons, it also irritated most of the press. But for a time it survived the traumas of its birth, and under George Barnes and Harman Grisewood there was a reasonably permissive, though it would now also be called an ...”

“... nurses and auxiliaries, scanning his patient details, would cheerily address him as ‘John’.) He was already using the name that was to become so familiar, the byline that launched a thousand pieces. Was he already that ‘Frank Kermode’, that effortlessly elegant, perceptive, slyly amusing, wide-ranging critic? Not really, not to judge by ...”

“... years after the war – Quarto, Departure, the Window. Then, at a party in Kensington, given by John Lehmann and intimidatingly full of ‘famous faces’, he meets John Wain, who is editing a series of books of new poetry. Oakes’s first book of verse is published under the title, Unlucky Jonah. It is well ...”

“... the timber that is consumed to fire them.) A name that crops up in both sets of letters is that of John Wain. Wain in 1962 wrote to the Guardian about MacDiarmid: ‘He is simultaneously truculent (to Whitehall) and fawning (to Moscow). He simultaneously praises some hog-wash written by a Government hack in Budapest and ...”

“... system of English literature’. Unlike those of his contemporaries whom he most envies (John Wain, Kingsley Amis), Bergonzi never managed to break out of the institution. As he admits, it was too comfortable. In the last thirty years he has taught at Manchester, then Warwick University, where he is now professor. True to his Morleyish ...”

“... disconcerted by such friends as Paul Johnson, who believes he would now be a strong Thatcherite, John Wain, who invokes Orwell as an opponent of Arthur Scargill, or in America Norman Podhoretz, who feels sure he would be taking his stand with the ‘neo-conservatives against the Left’. The New York Tribune, Rodden notes, went further and called Orwell ...”

“... Studying poetry spilled over naturally into writing it: Garfitt went to informal workshops with John Wain and Peter Levi, heard Ted Hughes read at the Poetry Society. Coghill read his poems, but wasn’t very enthusiastic; Peter Jay took a photo of him in a green silk smoking jacket looking ‘just like Rupert Brooke!’; he talked about jazz with ...”

“... The dust jacket of the final volume of Bevis Hillier’s epic life of John Betjeman shows the poet laureate seized by giggles. In this lengthy coda to Hillier’s authorised biography Betjeman appears in many lights, but he’s rarely carefree. ‘Nothing frightens me more than the thought of dying,’ he told a friend in 1958 ...”

“... above everything else occasions giving scope to the rapid cut and thrust of spoken controversy. John Lawlor, another pupil, has recorded that argument was the only form of conversation ever employed by Lewis in his presence. It must be a question whether such an eristic temperament made Lewis an ideal tutor, although he was assuredly an outstanding one. He ...”