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“... Seven years ago Roy Fuller published the third volume of his memoirs, which covered his life up to the end of the war. Reviewing it in this journal, I lamented his decision to stop there and called for a continuation, ‘all about the Woolwich, the Arts Council, the BBC and Oxford, with incidental observations on the conduct of the young, the remembered follies of youth, the tiresome defects of old age, and so forth ...”

“... Forty years ago, Roy Fuller was taking a close look at himself and finding the image unsatisfying, already a little disappointed. This one is remembered for a lyric. His place and period – nothing could be duller. In his new book of poems there is one called ‘On Birkett Marshall’s Rare Poems of the 17th Century’: Coppinger, Pordage, Collop, Fayne, Fettiplace, Farley, Chamberlain – They could be the darling poets of my youth: I almost search among the names for mine ...”

“... Roy Fuller was born in 1912, under what conjunction of planets I do not know, but the place of his birth was somewhere between Manchester and Oldham. His next stop was Blackpool, where he attended the High School until the age of 16. He might even in those distant days have been expected to go on at the age of 17 or 18 to a university, but, whether through parental or his own native caution or some other cause, he was instead articled to a local solicitor and was admitted in 1934 ...”

“... out of the language by assigning it such narrow, youthful duties? The three quotations are by 1. Roy Fuller, from Souvenirs,1 the first volume of his memoirs. The second, Vamp till ready,2 has recently appeared and its excellence shamed me into tracking down Vol. One. 2. Donald Davie, from his memoirs, just published under the title These the ...”

“... Porter); ‘I feel that the fuss and the language are not quite justified by the donné’ (Roy Fuller). Derek Walcott has suffered, perhaps more than any other contemporary poet writing in English, from accusations that his work is too showy. Some of the accusations stick. Much of Walcott’s early work – ‘Prelude’, for example, and ‘A Far ...”

“... This is the third and last volume of Roy Fuller’s memoirs, and it takes him up to the end of the war. It may sound ungracious, but I can’t help wondering why I find all three books so appealing that the strong implication of finality seems quite unacceptable. Though literate and pleasantly, even amusingly morose, these are not what are commonly called compulsive reads ...”

“... anguish. This book is a celebration of that Kafka. Its epigraph could well be this sentence from Roy Fuller’s splendid essay, which sets out to overturn Brod’s view that Kafka’s daily stint at the Insurance Office was totally destructive: ‘There are advantages,’ Fuller writes, ‘in a life, however ...”

“... One of Roy Fuller’s ‘Quatrains of an Elderly Man’ is called ‘Poetry and Whist’: How enviable Herrick’s Fourteen hundred lyrics!   Though, as the Scot complained when they dealt him all The trumps, a lot of them were small. The envy seems unjustified, for Fuller must have written far more than 1400 lyrics – indeed there are more than that in the Collected Poems of 1985, with dozens more to come ...”

“... of fear and derision. ‘The ranks of the illiterate raise puerile and rhythmless voices,’ wrote Roy Fuller. ‘Infantile simplicity is all,’ wrote Julian Symons.What no one in the symposium quite manages to say, yet almost everyone darkly hints at, is that in 1972 the ‘Poundian revolution’ still looked as if it was carrying the world before ...”

“... of rhythm and metre even while rejecting verse that goes yakkety-yakkety-yak. In his last years Roy Fuller was much absorbed by theories of prosody, the nature of metrical stresses, and what he called the artifice of versification. He concluded that ‘rhythm is the root of the matter in poetry’, rhythm as complex as Swinburne’s or as ...”

“... is ubiquitous – I came across it while writing this piece in the autobiography of Roy Fuller, no admirer of Orwell. Various images of Orwell, both literary and personal, are examined in the book’s search for the making of a reputation. Rodden believes that V.S. Pritchett’s obituary in the New Statesman was more important than any ...”

“... The poetry section is still weirder: Larkin one can understand, from Hamilton; also Alun Lewis, Roy Fuller, Frost and Graves. But Wilbur and Merrill, Heaney and Motion? I’m not surprised there’s little evidence of attachment to their work, just oblique dismay. For any sort of poetic credo, you have to go back to the poems, or the essays in A Poetry ...”

“... sensitive and influential slot.’ The highly sensitive slot, incidentally, went that year to Roy Fuller, who, when asked, declared himself ‘absolutely sympathetic to Marxist ideas’ and spoke of his ‘fundamental belief in the materialist conception of history’. And five years alter that, it went to the highly sensitive John Wain, thus ...”

“... others might call commitments.’ Naipaul himself, we are told, is obsessed with ruins, which, as Roy Fuller observed before him, are ‘implicit in every structure’. This obsession is no help when the desperate need is for improvement, any improvement. Nixon is keenly aware of the difference between actually living in a country full of chaos and ...”

“... to say about Powell himself as a writer. Though he deals competently with some poets (Betjeman and Roy Fuller, Kingsley Amis and Larkin), verse isn’t really his medium. Powell responds with most certainty to those literary forms most involved with time’s randomness, its ‘miscellaneousness’: the novel, the diary, the biography. Literature is for ...”