“... distillery. These many named and unnamed of the acknowledgment pages are the foundations on which a book is built: they help to determine its size and shape, its character and its content, and they deserve our attention. When Helen Vendler begins her recent book on Seamus Heaney, for example, ‘I am grateful to Seamus ...”

“... it by accident,’ Werner writes, ‘in the Amherst College Library, when it fell (rose?) out of an acid-free envelope. If I had not held it lightly in my hands, I would never have suspected the manner in which it was assembled … Look at it here, flying on the page, vying with light.’ Behold, Werner’s sacramental ...”

“... It was all done with a pastry board and a bulldog clip. Sheets of paper were clipped to the board, the board rested on the arms of his chair and the fountain-pen began to cover the pages with a scrawl that barely hinted at intimations of legibility ...”

“... This essay, in an earlier version, given as a paper at the conference on ‘Something We Have that They Don’t: Anglo-American Poetic Relations since the War’, organised by Mark Ford and Steve Clark under the aegis of the University of London ...”

“... Over Sixty Hours without an Execution.’ When PM, the biggest tabloid in Ciudad Juárez, can’t find a corpse to put on its front page, it has to come up with something. On 21 November last year it announced that ‘the city has just experienced an unusual outbreak of peace … the longest for three years ...”