“... When​ people equate pop lyrics with poetry, they expect pop to feel flattered and sometimes it is. So This Is Permanence reminds us that lyrics can reward close attention without being recast. The book collects the words of Ian Curtis, the singer in Joy Division, who committed suicide in 1980 at the age of 23. Joy Division belonged to the scene that emerged into the space left behind by punk ...”

“...  When Tracey Thorn was 17, she bought an electric guitar through a small ad in Melody Maker. Only when she got it home did she realise something was missing: she needed an amp. She played the guitar anyway and got ‘into the habit of making very little noise’. A couple of years later, with Ben Watt, she formed the band Everything But the Girl. In the last thirty years they’ve been ‘signed, dropped, re-signed, mixed and remixed’ while selling around nine million records ...”

“... When​ Pamela Hansford Johnson died in 1981, the New York Times described her as ‘one of England’s best-known novelists’. I knew her name, or thought I did, but couldn’t recall the title of any of her books. Her 27 novels are mostly out of print. The New York Times briskly sets them aside, along with their author: Her death came almost a year after that of C ...”

“... Before​ Nico was one of Andy Warhol’s ‘Superstars’, before she sang with the Velvet Underground and made six solo albums, she was known as ‘the girl from La Dolce Vita’. Fellini had spotted her hanging around on set and gave her a small part as a model called Nico. Nico wears beatnik black and her space-age platinum hair is loose. She glides through four languages and moves with theatrical lightness while taking charge of every shot ...”

“... It is hard to make a living from poetry. Lavinia Greenlaw has turned her hand to all manner of activities to support her work – publishing, teaching, arts administration, posts as writer-in-residence. These haven’t just been ways of paying the bills: her imagination has been cultivated by dealing with institutions ...”

“... human about understanding can never be a function of mere rapidity. Spock ‘gets it’ too fast. Lavinia Greenlaw has strong feelings about travel and speeds of communication and something like a nostalgia for old-fashioned ways of sending messages. During a recent interview, she observed: ‘The physical effort of the rider on horseback, the letter ...”

“... some crease of detail or fold of radiance. It is in just such shining hiddenness that Lavinia Greenlaw excels. Her calm, springy, whispering monologues – ‘Galileo’s Wife’, or a soliloquy from one Dr William Pancoast, Philadelphia 1884 – are the best things in the book. She seems to have an instinct for unsettling detail: The wrong ...”