- He was awarded the Whitbread Poetry Prize in 2005 for his collection titled "Cold Calls".
- He was awarded the C.B.E. (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in the 2007 Queen's New Years Honors List for his services to literature.
- Son of a postal clerk father and homemaker mother. He trained a toy pistol on a girl in the street and took off with her ice cream. His formal education ended when he was 17 years old and served with the British Army during World War II.
- During World War II, he was stationed in then Palestine (now Israel) where he helped himself to six blank Army pay books-official documents used to record a soldier's pay and establish identity. He boasted idly about selling them. He was court-martialled, and served one-and-a-half years in Acre Central Prison, a 12th-century fortress built by the Crusaders in Galilee.
- He was one of the original signatories of the Committee of 100, a British antiwar group founded in 1960 by Bertrand Russell.
- Primarily famous as a poet, he was persuaded to do a bit of acting in a TV movie by his friend Ken Russell, who subsequently cast him in two other roles and hired him to write a film script (Savage Messiah (1972)). He is known to have done some rewriting on "Crusoe" (1989).
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