The Editors

From Zoë Heller's 1998 review of Bridget Jones' Diary (and two other novels in the same mould): Over the last ten years, in Britain and America, there has been a significant proliferation of a certain kind of feminine first-person narrative. The author is almost always a young(ish), single, middle-class woman, and the narrative a jaunty record of a frisky personal life... The feminine first-person narrative is unabashedly self-involved. It is knowing and urbane, but it is also showily neurotic and self-derogatory... Judging by the grim sameness of these three novels, the FFPN has already hardened into a new literary orthodoxy, a new correctness.

Uri Avnery’s latest column: Rouhani is the very opposite of his predecessor. If the Mossad had been asked to sketch the worst possible Iranian leader Israel could imagine, they would have come up with someone like him.

Two poems by Seamus Heaney were published in the first issue of the LRB. A couple of dozen followed over the years, the most recent of them, versions of Rilke, in 2005. Two years ago Andrew O'Hagan wrote about travelling through England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales with Heaney and Karl Miller: Karl always imagines, in the Edinburgh style, that a beer means a half pint, but Seamus is a proper drinker and you see pints when he’s around.

Among the flotsam that drifts about the internet, coming to surfers' occasional notice, is Arthur C. Fifield's mocking rejection letter to Gertrude Stein of 19 April 1912: 'Only one look, only one look is enough. Hardly one copy would sell here. Hardly one. Hardly one.' It received a flurry of attention in February 2011, and again a few weeks ago. Time perhaps for it to be joined by a note T.S. Eliot sent to Stein 15 years later, on 8 September 1927: I am very sorry to return these chapters, but in any case I should not be able to use them for a very long time...

From 'The Love Song of T.S. Eliot's Secretary: A Memoir', by Brigid O'Donovan, published in the Fall/Winter issue of Confrontation (1975): Every morning a large pile of contributions would arrive, many of them from agencies which were, and remained for years, household words in the literary world. These contributions were without exception complete rubbish: stories about dogs and cats; holiday adventure; poetry by total amateurs. All a tribute I imagine to the tiny salaries and low postage rates of the 1930s, which enabled firms to carry on from year to year without looking closely, if at all, into The Criterion corner. (A tremendous bonus was the equally extraordinary selection of books sent for review, many of them first class in fields The Criterion never covered for review. TSE took first choice of the books, I had second, and the remainder were sold by the firm.)