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“... recalcitrance of an underworld brawler. The former heavyweight champion is no less threatening in Thom Jones’s two previous collections of short stories; though kept in the wings, he is mentioned frequently by the centre-stage characters: a doctor who is ‘about to smirk’ when walking in on a couple having sex in the hospital ward is arrested by the ...”

“... draw aim on passing cars and people: ‘It used to put my folks real uptight,’ he tells Herr. In Thom Jones’s ‘Break on Through’, the incredibly savage Baggit also has trouble hacking it ‘back in the World’: a few months after his return, laden with honours, he barricades himself in a beauty parlour with his mother for 14 hours before shooting ...”

“... anthologies, while Basil Bunting, Dylan Thomas, Edwin Morgan, R.S. Thomas, Iain Crichton Smith, Thom Gunn, Hugh MacDiarmid and Norman MacCaig are unassailably part of our consciousness of the poetic landscape. Auden and MacNeice, too, though the omission in both books of Stephen Spender suggests that he has slipped out of contention – either because his ...”

“... a nomadic, rootless, perpetually mobile way of life. It’s a continuation of the America Thom Gunn discovered: At worst, one is in motion; and at best, Reaching no absolute in which to rest, One is always nearer by not keeping still. Motel Chronicles is part-journal, part-autobiography, part-scrapbook. Memories of childhood; meetings with his ...”

“... and partly compensating for them. Today these skills are derided even as they disappear. Thom Gunn once wrote a poem celebrating them called ‘All do not all things well’ – it’s not mentioned in Autopia – which describes two ‘auto freaks’ from the American underclass who dismantle cars on driveways. Neighbours who disapprove of the mess ...”

“... Many years ago Thom Gunn remarked: ‘To write poetry without knowing, for example, about the proper use of runovers used to be considered as impertinent as it would be now to apply for a job as a truck driver without knowing how to shift gear.’ (Wearily, in a sanguine attempt not to be misunderstood, he added: ‘It is true that being able to shift gears does not mean that one can drive straight or that one has the necessary stamina to keep the job, but it is a prerequisite ...”

“... real risk of collapse. It can also be an effective literary strategy. Clive Wilmer, writing about Thom Gunn’s poem on his mother’s death, identifies ‘the note of reticence needed for speech to occur at all’ as being what moves the reader. In his struggles with depression, Dillon seemed to find in books the antidote to uncontrollable emotion. ‘I ...”

“... bra. Certain fetishistic gestures were weighed and discarded. I had the idea to post a picture of Thom Yorke’s Normal Brother on Twitter the morning of the election for good luck. (This is the one I had in mind.) I felt in my bones that Andy Yorke would help carry us through – and, if things went according to plan, the result would lend him an aura of ...”

“... Having sampled Peter Cave’s biker novelettes, and the works of Mick Norman, Alex R. Stuart and Thom Ryder, he nominated the 18-volume Richard Allen Bildungsroman as his template. Delivered from the bourgeois neurosis invention (the demand for fresh ‘product’), his charged and spiteful prose could repossess the reactionary melancholy of Allen’s ...”