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“... contemporary poems attain the ideal completeness symbolised in ‘The Painter and the Fish’. Ted Hughes, well capable of it, has long rejected certain formal and social co-ordinates which his poetry now sorely misses.† Perhaps difficulties begin at the point where archetypes cannot do the whole work of psychology, where dying animals cannot altogether ...”

“... spirit with which he wrote them.’ Though it lacks Hazlitt’s momentum and flexibility, Ted Hughes’s prose has a similarly vehement enthusiasm, a pulsing directness that makes him testify to ‘the simple immediacy and as it were natural inevitability’ with which his idea of Shakespeare’s Tragic Equation grew in his mind, ‘and which is no small ...”

“... crocodile who ate his arm and swallowed a clock. ‘That crocodile,’ Hook announces in Act II of Peter Pan, ‘would have had me before now, but … before he can reach me I hear the tick and bolt.’ ‘Some day,’ retorts the bespectacled boatswain Smee, ‘the clock will run down, and then he’ll get you.’ In the end, of course, time runs out for the ...”

“... A small ad in Private Eye seeks a companion ‘sexy, feminine and discrete’. Siamese twins, I suppose, need not bother to apply. It is harder to divine why this translation of Murasaki’s Diary renders one passage by the words: ‘This is not to say that her women are always so genteel; if they forget themselves they can come out with the most indiscrete verses ...”

“... Four possible candidates, varying in attainments, would be T.E. Lawrence, Robert Graves, Peter Fleming (perhaps both Flemings) and Richard Hughes. It makes no difference that Lawrence was half-Irish, the Flemings mostly Scottish, and Hughes partly Welsh. The presidential or ...”

“... could be turned in his clay to the bung in a wine barrel. It is a trope that recurs repeatedly in Peter Redgrove’s recent work, You take turns to be food, Before you can grind wheat you have to be wheat, Before you can eat bread you are a nice new crust Eaten by Mary, who chooses a crust-you here, A mouthful of Shakespeare’s breath there, a glass Of ...”

“... On the front cover of The Battle for Bermondsey there is a photograph of Peter Tatchell as, I imagine, he would like to be seen: a steady innocent gaze, a determined tilt to the chin, a youthful crusading air. He looks fragile but brave. In the background, slightly out of focus, is an older comrade looking decidedly askance, not to say horrified ...”

“... off it recalling: ‘Bosley was quite keen on me.’ What on earth were they looking for – Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin, Seamus Heaney and Charles Causley – that they should have rated Bosley’s heart-warming dexterity (feelingful as well as formal) below, for instance, 18 solid unpunctuated pages of pornographic daydream: Kenneth Bernard’s ‘The ...”

“... Certainly, to read a collection like The Oxford Book of Narrative Verse, newly-edited by Iona and Peter Opie, is to be reminded of the powerful appeal that’s made in poetry by ‘the kind of story in which, you want to know what happens next’. The Opies’ choice is often cautious and occasionally perverse. In some respects, moreover, their book belongs ...”

“... and then, coming towards the nearer end of the line, the dark, odd and uncouth figure of Ted Hughes. In the superb doorstop of his Collected Poems, Hughes comes across as a more diverse poet than I remembered, and in many ways a more sympathetic and engaging presence. But it’s true that a good many of his poems ...”

“... in 1975 and died, a multi-millionaire, in 1981. Not so his minister for public works, Davis Hughes, a former schoolteacher from rural Orange who is the villain of Drew’s story and, like Utzon, is still with us. Drew charges, with convincing documentation, that Hughes intended even before the election to get Utzon ...”

“... Paisley – who helped maintain the minority Labour government in power was fair game. Thanks to Peter Wright’s revelations we are more or less familiar with what went on in this period, though it is important to say that Wallace was the first to make public admission of these campaigns, well before Wright. Homosexual smears were directed against Edward ...”

“... Other references suggest that he may still have been writing after 240. But as Benjamin Acosta-Hughes and Susan Stephens write in Callimachus in Context, it is clear at least that he ‘lived the majority of his adulthood during the reign of the second Ptolemy (282-46), the period when the Ptolemaic empire was at its height’. He was born in Cyrene, a ...”

“... made by the BBC, several websites and the syndication of photographic rights across the globe. Peter Firstbrook’s book is written from a very English perspective, Ghosts of Everest from a very American one: neither takes up the really important issues. The Last Climb began life as a history of all the early Everest expeditions but, once Mallory’s body ...”

“... The belief underlies his veneration for the great ‘talking heads’ like Lord Clark and Robert Hughes, as in a more general way it underlies his love affair with British TV ‘culture’ when it is not merely mausoleum-like. Clearly James’s feeling for British culture is that of the outsider who can dissimulate an insider’s manner, but who will never ...”