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“... bombast of beer and Beaujolais’. It is difficult to know how to judge the verse in D.J. Enright’s new book. It’s not really verse; at every opportunity, Enright slips out of the metrical corridor and back into his prosy, bookish study. These poems should perhaps be seen as little exhaust-puffs from his ...”

“... author appears to have become once more unpalatable to British literary taste. Some years ago D.J. Enright asked the question: ‘Aimez-Vous Goethe?’ The rest of his essay title supplied the answer: ‘An Enquiry into English Attitudes of Non-Liking towards German Literature’. In the introduction to their translation of the Italian Journey ...”

“... Monsieur Jourdain concludes from this that he has been speaking prose all his life. D.J. Enright’s new book is subtitled ‘Poems and Proses’. There is a poem, ‘Martyr to Meaning’, about a poet whose lines in youth were ‘musical, mysterious, modestly magical’. But ‘the older he grows the more he worries about meaning.’ ‘Quaint ...”

“... sound too wise, too knowing or too perky among the native flora and fauna of his examples. Dennis Enright and David Rawlinson pass the test with flying colours, and their observations not only shed light on the topic but add their own quota of good things to the many they have selected. They are well aware of the possible drawbacks, and of the fact that ...”

“... certainly rejected ‘Modernism’. ‘The modern movement began with a brilliant blaze,’ said Enright. ‘Unfortunately the flames got out of control, and ever since we have been warming ourselves at the embers.’ Davie, in his youth, argued for consolidation, for a healthy ‘loss of nerve’. Neither he nor Wain found it simple to reject Pound, but ...”

“... from her verse the tension that we feel in Hardy’s. Accordingly she sometimes sounds like D.J. Enright, another unbeliever unable to leave alone the belief that he was reared in, yet happy, as Hardy never was, to remain suspended between Belief and Unbelief. That happiness – its name is Irony – perhaps is quite unhappy, really. The possibility is ...”

“... is right that illness is one of the great neglected themes of literature – and the evidence from Enright’s literary anthology of illness suggests she is – it is probably because it is precisely in illness that the body gets to have its say. Love and battle and jealousy and the rest of the well-worn literary themes give the soliloquies to the soul. Only ...”

“... eggs of ostriches’. Having complained of the incongruity of content, I must add that Mr Enright’s wide reading and sophisticated interests ensure that the greater proportion of the entries have literary merit – on a rough count, 520 out of 760. Of these five hundred or so, 370 are poetry, and of the three hundred more memorable pieces, 61 come ...”

“... studies of Kafka’s Prague and of his relations with women. It also contains poems by D.J. Enright and Jerzy Peterkiewicz (not the best work of either) and stories by Philip Roth and the editor on what might have been: a Kafka alive in America after the war, a bachelor schoolmaster; alive in the war and fighting with the partisans. These are not merely ...”

“... French? – Larivière. (Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations in English are taken from D.J. Enright’s revised translation.) This passage is astonishing for a number of reasons, but principally for showing us a writer, famed for his advocacy of the aesthetic solution to the problem of living, so relaxed about the rules of the relevant literary ...”

“... terms of the curious quality of Larkinian art. ‘The impulse to preserve,’ Larkin wrote to D.J. Enright in 1955, ‘lies at the bottom of all art.’ For Larkin the preservation of the moment itself involved a transposition of sex, as with the trilby hat in a snapshot of the girl from ‘Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album’ – ‘(Faintly ...”

“... Bogarde (‘irresistible’), Edward Blishen (‘lose no time in starting’ to read him), D.J. Enright (‘a champion of ordinary existence against the whimsies of the over-educated’) and Craig Raine (‘thank goodness, a far cry from The Waste Land, and the indictment of earthly existence as foul and absurd, which has been a sacred tenet of ...”

“... now and again, unseriously. Of Instant Chronicles it is nearly enough to report that it is D.J. Enright’s new book, and that it is just as winning as the earlier ones. He continues to write little satires upon circumstance, broodings upon stale starts, notes upon the ways of a rather battered world. The places are Egypt, Japan, Siam and Poland, the last ...”

“... the parochial grain of contemporary English culture but often with sustained exogamous passion. Enright’s reviews are more conspicuously abroad thoughts from home than Josipovici’s or Heller’s, and ‘the British reader’, named or implied, is often summoned up and flattered as a necessary moderating agency in a world where foreign (and in particular ...”

“... Derek Traversi, D.W. Harding, L.G. Salingar, Peter Ure, Ian Watt, J.C. Maxwell, L.C. Knights, D.J. Enright, Roy Strong, John Broadbent, Arthur Humphreys, Philip Collins, Pat Rogers, D.W. Jefferson and John Preston. What is disturbing is that everyone made his reputation elsewhere, often in the format which is properly Leavisian, the short, iconoclastic ...”