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“... from this thoroughly unreliable, disgracefully edited version. The compendious biography by Roberta Reeder is rather more compendium than biography, if the latter is taken to denote a form of art. Readers seeking the facts of Akhmatova’s life will be able to locate them here, but the method of the book, the relentlessly cumulative stitching ...”

“... If he had been writing in Petersburg in 1910 or thereabouts Philip Larkin would probably have been an Acmeist. He would have been in protest, that is to say, against the portentousness of the Symbolists, like Blok and Bely, against their bogus pleasure in the idea of Apocalypse, and their bogus parade of the mysterious and the ‘unknowable’. In his essay ‘The Pleasure Principle’ Larkin observes that ‘it is sometimes useful to remind ourselves of the simpler aspects of things normally regarded as complicated,’ such as the writing of a poem ...”