“... widely translated) to make its author a multi-millionaire (and certainly not if he or she is with Faber and Faber). Bellow has a good time detailing the evidence for and display of this newly-gotten wealth – a suite at the Crillon in Paris, neck-ties from Hermès, shirts from Turnbull and Asser and a mink throw on the ...”

“... up on the toes, good black notebook. Time to brood. But Dalgleish? He’s too grand somehow for Faber. Probably sponsored by C.H. Sisson at Carcanet. The right credentials. What does he write about? Obviously, the job helps: ‘his next book of poems contained that extraordinary one about a murdered child.’ Otherwise? John Betjeman in subject ...”

“... his status as an aristocrat while identifying wholly with it as a poet. In his introduction to the Faber Book of Modern American Verse W.H. Auden pointed out that ‘every American poet feels that the whole responsibility ... has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one, whereas a British poet can take writing more for granted, and ...”

“... of flowers sent by Ted’s parents, Ted, Helga Huws & Charles Monteith, Ted’s editor at Faber’. And she listens: ‘The British have an amazing “stiff upper-lipness” – they don’t fuss or complain or whine – except in a joking way & even women in toe to shoulder casts discuss family, newspaper topics & so on with amazing ...”

“... of residence or identity and I’m sent home to get them.14 May. A piece in the Independent about David Blunkett tackling falling standards in education. I am pictured, though whether as evidence of decline or hope for the future I can’t make out. Either would please me.Judging from newspaper reports, the congregation at Ted Hughes’s memorial service in ...”

“... correspondence, which was finally published in 1998, says that Keynes’s editor at Faber wrote again and again in the margins of the copy: ‘Why delete?’, ‘Why bowdlerise this?’) The collection had been slated for publication a decade earlier, but Dudley Ward, one of the other trustees, complained that even Keynes’s version was ...”

“... said. To have in your life a problem play, to have it be a problem play because of your life.As David Mitchell notes in his introduction to this reissue of Medusa’s Ankles, the selected stories are as deep and broad as the three decades they cover, though the ones from Sugar and Other Stories (1987) are the most indispensable. Each is different from the ...”

“... a truer picture would emerge: of her doing and her desiring at the same time. It would create, as David Trinidad is quoted as saying in Peter Steinberg’s introduction, ‘a movie of her life’. Still, in the end, we must take a point of view. The penultimate line of the chronology reads: ‘11 February 1963: Protects children then dies by suicide.’ It is ...”

“... is consoling, too, both of us happiest reading what we know already. 11 October. Stephen Page (Faber) and Andrew Franklin (Profile Books) come round to take delivery of the MS of Untold Stories, a collection of diaries and other memoirs which they are to publish jointly next September. It’s in a big box file with some of the stuff in manuscript and the ...”

“... person within.’ (Hoyer is the editor of Elbe’s own notes and diaries, not to be confused with David Ebershoff, on whose ghastly novel The Danish Girl is based.) Jan Morris defines her transition as a journey on the path to identity: ‘I had reached Identity’; Ashley speaks of her desire ‘to be whole’, and her ‘great sense of purpose to make ...”

“... for the act of falling in love. A general critical study of Kipling prefaces Craig Raine’s Faber selection of prose by the writer. Raine’s remarkably penetrating, sympathetic essay – the best introduction to Kipling since Miss Tompkins’s work was published – mentions this image of the charcoal corpses as something that ‘never relaxes its hold ...”

“... other people became stalwarts of a kind, didn’t they? Hugo Williams?Oh, they came in. David Harsent was another.Peter Dale?I think we published some of his poems. He never became quite one of the gang. There was a certain amount of indecision about him then. David Harsent appeared from nowhere. I think via the ...”