['Vamp Till Ready'] takes us, roughly, from [Fuller's] time as a solicitor's articled clerk in London in the early Thirties (Fuller was 20 in 1932) up to, more or less, the present day. That is to say, through his conscripted days in the Royal Navy ('The Andrew'), postwar solicitorship with the Woolwich, Professorship of Poetry at Oxford, Governorship of the BBC, the novels and the poems….

But, as with 'Souvenirs,' although there is a ground bass of strict chronology, the variations in time and the various themes interweave throughout without much regard for strict tempo. My musical metaphor is no doubt faulty; but nevertheless the models here are Proust and Powell. While Dicky Umfraville doesn't occur anywhere in the background, it wouldn't come as much of a surprise if he did. A lot of this, with its Soho phoneys, eccentric colleagues and nicely remembered detail, is very funny. All of it is interesting. It's a picture of a period—or, if you like to think of it that way, of three periods: Pre-War, War and Post-War. I found it more satisfying than the first book….

Fuller, although a novelist of talent, is most prized for his poetry. 'The Individual And His Times' is a selection of his verse made by Victor Lee. The poems are divided into sections (The Passage of Time, The Poet and His Art, The Poet of Everyday Life, Nature, etc) and the lines are numbered. It carries an 'autobiographical' preface by Fuller, explaining the poems in each section, and there are notes 'compiled in consultation with' him at the end. In other words, this is a book for schools. It favours short poems and neglects some of Fuller's best work of the War ('The Photographs' would be too 'advanced' for schoolmasters), though there are also marvellous poems included.

Since it is now 20 years since Fuller's 'Collected Poems' appeared, when he was 50, it would certainly seem that another 'Collected' was overdue. It is, I think, a disgrace to British publishing that such a book hasn't been produced. In effect, one of our finest writers is being passed over in favour of tripe—the sentimental, the sensational, the blockbuster embryo film-epic, you name it. It's easier to name it than to think about it.