“... In ‘Eternal Father’, the last story in Happy Families, three sisters meet for a candlelit reunion around their father’s coffin, in a sunken park in Mexico City, ‘a cool, shaded urban depression in the midst of countless avenues and mute skyscrapers’. The father died a rich man. We aren’t told how he made his money, although picking up themes from the other stories in the collection we can guess: real estate, construction, politics? (‘He made other people work and took advantage of them,’ his oldest daughter says ...”

“... Elizabeth Jane Howard had been a novelist for forty years before she published The Light Years, the first volume of the Cazalet chronicles, in 1990. The fifth and final volume, All Change, was published in 2013, and she died in January this year, aged ninety. Her stepson Martin Amis advised her to embark on the Cazalet books, when she was hesitating between possibilities ...”

“... It’s​ an uncanny thing, to revisit a book you liked in your youth. Even when the book is still as good as you thought it was, it isn’t the same book, because you’re not the same reader – you come at every sentence from a different angle, with new information and different tastes. The book doesn’t change, but you change and times change. I have a distinct memory of reading Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time as a teenager and finding it witty, astringent, persuasive: all those impressions are mixed up in my memory with the strong green of the Penguin Crime paperback ...”

“... In​ Olive, Again, her seventh book, Elizabeth Strout returns to her character Olive Kitteridge, a maths teacher in small-town Maine. A number of the chapters in Strout’s first, eponymous book about the character had already appeared in print as short stories before the novel’s publication in 2008, so that Olive Kitteridge is really half a novel, half a collection of stories; Olive, Again and most of Strout’s other books have the same hybrid form ...”

“... Pamela Hansford who​ ? When I asked friends and family, they vaguely knew the name but couldn’t place it – until I said she was married to C.P. Snow and then they vaguely remembered that too. They were much clearer about him: the two cultures argument, and Leavis’s vituperation, and some novels revolving around Cambridge colleges. Someone had read one of those novels long ago but couldn’t remember anything about it ...”

“... In 1980, when she was in her late thirties, Marilynne Robinson published her first novel, Housekeeping. Her way of seeing things seemed to have sprung from nowhere and was like no one else’s. The novel won awards, high praise from critics, and the devotion of readers, and it has not been forgotten: its fame has spread in a slow aftershock, passed on by word of mouth, cropping up on lists of the best contemporary novels ...”

“... Alice Munro doesn’t write much about her writing: there are only a few interviews, hardly any essays or journalistic pieces, and we don’t catch her holding forth about her literary likes and dislikes. But here in her new collection, The View from Castle Rock, she speaks to us directly, first in a brief introduction explaining the way the book has been put together, and then in a piece, ‘No Advantages’, in which she describes in her own person the researches into her family history that have resulted in some of the stories that follow ...”

“... Every​ so often literary history convulses, then settles down into a different shape. New tastes and new politics cast a lurid light on the judgments of forty, fifty, sixty years ago: some established names take a tumble and some forgotten names rise, mostly after the deaths of the authors concerned. New-old writers are good for publishers, but this literary resurrection is genuinely, too, a kind of justice for the forgotten, and a necessary remapping of the past ...”

“... When​ Jean Stafford published Boston Adventure in 1944, at the age of 29, Life magazine called her ‘the most brilliant of new fiction writers’. The novel sold an impressive 380,000 copies and she went on to publish two more, The Mountain Lion (1947) and The Catherine Wheel (1952). Throughout the 1950s, her short stories were a fixture in the New Yorker ...”

“... I’ve​ found out something disturbing about Emily Holmes Coleman, which is that she wrote – and in biro – in other people’s books. She turned up once at the house of a friend, the novelist Mary Wesley, travelling with just two carrier bags of her things. Wesley mentioned that she had been reading Simone Weil, and the next morning found Coleman ‘sitting in bed wearing a fisherman’s jersey busily defacing Miss Weil’s Letter to a Priest ...”

“... Iris Origo​ wrote biographies of an Italian poet, an Italian saint, a merchant from Prato, and Byron’s Italian mistress; her bestselling book was the diary she kept of her experiences on her estate in the Val d’Orcia in Tuscany during the Second World War. Everything in her life and writing was inflected by her relationship with the idea of Italy and its past (of course it was not always one ‘Italy’), as well as with the actual 20th-century country where she mostly lived ...”

“... Another​ report from the front line of the sex war. New York Review Books has reprinted a clever little book, published in 1972, about the first Mrs George Meredith, which is nothing so crude as a blow struck in battle: it’s a poignant needling, deflating the male creative genius – not ungenerously – and providing yet another plausible case of a wife abused by posterity ...”

“... At​ a certain point in my reading life, aged 12 or 13, I promoted myself to the adult section of my local library, climbing up three wide steps covered in yellow linoleum. There, not knowing how to choose, I gravitated to Elizabeth Bowen – along with others, including Compton Mackenzie and Hugh Walpole, of whose writing I can’t now recall even the faintest flavour ...”

“... It isn’t​ necessarily a good thing when a publisher brings out a writer’s uncollected stories. More is sometimes less. Barrels are scraped, doubts – often the writer’s own, if she or he is no longer around – are set aside; these stories may not have been collected for good reason, and reading someone’s weaker attempts can dilute the power of the rest ...”