Susannah Clapp

This year​ Claire Keegan, long esteemed, became fêted. Small Things like These has just won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and been longlisted for the Booker. Foster, published in 2010, has been filmed as The Quiet Girl. I shall not see it, at least not for a while; the words on the page are lodged in my head. Keegan’s fiction makes most novels look too fancy; her short...

Tom Stoppard wrote​ Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead while listening to ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ and ‘Like a Rolling Stone’. He would like to have written Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen. Threaded into each of his plays is a coded tribute: an MP in Dirty Linen, a clerk in The Invention of Love and two characters in Leopoldstadt are all called...

The best ever riff​ on bags was written by Lucy Ellmann in her novel Doctors and Nurses (2006). In swirling prose she attacks – as if just knocking it out – the essential points about these essential accessories. The quick character guide they offer: ‘Tiny shiny hand-held PODS for flighty ice maidens; galumphing CARPET-BAGS for the jilted and jaded’. The utter...

If​ you live in London, squares are best. They have a plot. They tilt the natives away from secrecy and hoarding – from their hidden back gardens – towards a shared space. One end isn’t grander than the other; indeed, unless you are a postwoman, it won’t be clear where they start and finish. Ideal for snoopers, snipers, novelists, cartoonists and daydreamers, squares...

In the days​ before artists brought colour to the cover, the London Review of Books was black and white. Of course, originally, it had no front at all: the first edition, in 1979, was meekly folded into the New York Review of Books. The following year it jumped out of that pouch and into a world where literary journals were routinely typographical. Not all faces around the editorial table...