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“... recalls the traditional injunction of the Muse to the blocked sonneteer; and although the poet’s reading – as, ironically, here – provides some necessary roughage, the injunction has been most ceremoniously fulfilled. It is appropriate, for his artist wife, that several of these poems should celebrate the light (and odd that one of the finest, ‘Writing ...”

“... Till recently, I’ve dodged most of Peter Reading’s work. He seemed so much the darling of the TLS and of a metropolitan circle whose powerfully disseminated views it is often essential to evade in the interests of finding a position which affords a degree of independence. Seeing stray poems by him in magazines, I thought of him as having a gift of designer outrage, whose appeal to the sophisticated might be suspect ...”

“... Peter Reading, 1946-2011) ‘The only permanence I suppose is in having been’ –                     thus           in four words             conjugating present and past         that one may say ‘has been’       drunk and (I guess, not having seen it) sober             a half century at words for animals, people, plants the planet ...”

“... not know that this project had designs on your life choices. The sleeve notes, though, include a reading list and recommended internet links. All that connects the reading list and the actual music is the source of the sounds. Much popular music these days uses samples, pre-recorded elements underpinning a new sound ...”

“... the demotic: fuck, balls, cock, cunt – this is Larkin’s equivalent of dialect. Nowadays Peter Reading is offering something similar, inserting into a great variety of verse-forms a language that is coarse, prosey and, some say, as they at first said about Larkin, scarcely the language of poetry at all. ...”

“... funfairs at dusk. Over the past couple of hundred years, the possibility of a single coherent reading of what you see as you stand in any one place has become more and more difficult. Each new message shouts as loud as it can, knowing that it has to compete. Consider what you must attend to as you walk down Piccadilly. Traffic-lights to stay alive. Shop ...”

“... The fox on the cover of this issue is walking past Peter Campbell’s house in South London, the house (he wrote about it in the LRB in September) where he and his wife had lived since 1963. Peter died – in that house – on 25 October and the picture on the cover is the last one he painted ...”

“... Music, end the cycle. That torchlit serpent should uncoil in the text as the hard-won yield of reading. But Vendler tags it with a gloss (‘Snake-handling religious service; East Tennessee’), and inserts similar notes throughout. Tattoos thus becomes a score of self-contained lyrics, while what might hold between poems is obscured by explanation. Yet ...”

“... students of literature experience an invigorating shock of pleasure, surprise, illumination upon reading a work of criticism – perhaps because, like the natural scientists described by Thomas Kuhn, we are bound by ‘paradigms of research’ which tend to direct attention to accepted modes of expression and discovery. Some time in 1987 I happened on an ...”

“... 55 poets, you feel, blush for it. Mostly they contradict it. The style of interesting poets like Peter Didsbury, John Ash, Pauline Stainer and one of the editors, Michael Hulse, is not particularly ‘democratic’, but playfully enigmatic and donnish. There is a tendency to think aloud with a somewhat creaky jauntiness, as if the poets were sharing secrets ...”

“... My acceptance of an offer to review the Kavanagh book landed me in a mess of puzzles. Peter Kavanagh, the poet’s brother, starts straight off, sentence one, by announcing: ‘When I write about Patrick Kavanagh I write as a partisan, as his alter ego, almost as his evangelist.’ And if you think that’s a dubious basis for a biography, what about this? As far as possible I shall avoid writing of him as a brother since my interest in him was mainly as a poet ...”

“... It is 35 years, almost to the day, that I first set eyes on Peter, at lunch in a restaurant, I think on Goodge Street, with Dudley Moore and Jonathan Miller, the meeting arranged by John Bassett, whose idea it was that we should all work together writing the review that turned into Beyond the Fringe. Having already written while still an undergraduate a large slice of the two West End shows Pieces of Eight and One Over the Eight, Peter was quite prosperous and it showed ...”

“... one can do without. Much that is laboriously established here could be understood better by a reading of Evelyn Waugh. The catalogue quotes the description of Poppet Green’s paintings from Put out more flags (‘Eighty years ago her subjects would have been knights in armour, ladies in wimples and distress; fifty years ago “nocturnes”; twenty years ...”

“... swabbed up without any attempt to pursue a clear narrative line. This collection also included ‘Reading the Banns’, a light, witty and tender wedding-day poem 12 pages long (there is more than one kind of ‘match’ in the book). ‘The Whole of the Sky’, which forms the central section of CloudCuckooLand (1997) and in which Armitage spied on the ...”

“... self-destructive, stripped of family, a figure who slides towards pathos and even absurdity (Peter Sellers as moustache-twitching Gallic ingénu). At the beginning of the trail, the central event has already happened; the detective, divested of any power to abort or determine, can only reconstruct, seeking an origin, an ‘answer’. The genre is ...”