When I first came here <nowiki>[</nowiki>Hampstead Heath<nowiki>]</nowiki> I was starting my second novel, The Folding Star, which is a very twilight… - Alan Hollinghurst

<nowiki>[</nowiki>John Betjeman's] ability to make people laugh resounds through this book as persistently as church bells do through his poems.

I was sent there <nowiki>[</nowiki>Canford School<nowiki>]</nowiki> in 1967, at the age of thirteen, and at some point in my first year was issued with the OUP anthology Fifteen Poets: Chaucer to Arnold. This was my introduction to "Tintern Abbey", "Kubla Khan", Keats's Odes and many other poems which, read over and over, became and have remained a sort of inner music for me, whether purposely memorised or not. But the one of the fifteen who spoke most persuasively to my adolescent mind was Tennyson, in "The Lady of Shalott", "Ulysses" and the lyrics from The Princess; I won the junior reading competition with a passage from "Morte d’Arthur", making the most of the "sharp-smitten" clanging crags and "the long glories of the winter moon". Those effects, like many of Tennyson's best, are slightly over-orchestrated, a display of unrestrained assonantal genius, with a fascinating power of prickling the scalp, much treasured at that age, and for me never lost.