“... Recently in this journal C.K. Stead explained the dilemma of being a popular Australasian performer in England: ‘He can only be fully understood at home: but there he’s likely to encounter sullenness and resentment, which is overcome, paradoxically, by the irresistible force of a fame earned where the comprehension of what he is doing must be less than complete ...”

“... Some readers do not much like Margaret Drabble’s later novels because they are so different from her earlier successes. She may have lost one public and not as yet entirely won over another. Her novel writing career began brilliantly and precociously with A Summer Bird-Cage (1963), published when she was 24. Since then, the preoccupations of her novels have generally kept pace with what one assumes to have been her personal progress from Cambridge graduate, through marriages, pregnancies, growing children, marital complications, and high professional achievement, to what in 1980 – her 40th year – she memorably called ‘The Middle Ground ...”

“... London now has an autumn season when the big fiction blockbusters are delivered to a public with longer evenings for reading and Christmas money to spend. It may not be anywhere near as clearly marked off as it is in New York and the launching machinery still creaks a bit, but its component parts are familiar from the smoother-running American model ...”

“... Howard Jacobson began writing novels late in life. As he tells it, the life was nothing much to write about. He was born in Manchester in 1942. His family was Jewish with a modest upward mobility track leading from Salford to Whitefield via Prestwich. The Jacobsons evidently made it to Prestwich. The young Howard went to grammar school and read English at Cambridge ...”

“... Momentous changes in copyright law, such as those of 1710, 1842, 1890 and 1911, are preceded by periods of turmoil and radical uncertainty about the rights and wrongs of intellectual property. We are in such a period now. The problem, in the short term, is how the British Government will implement the ‘harmonising’ of the latest EU regulations on copyright ...”

“... years of the Cold War. This curious fact is noted in David Monaghan’s monograph The Novels of John le Carré (1985). Smiley married his wife Ann towards the end of the World War Two. He was evidently then well into his thirties. In 1960, in A Murder of Quality, he was described as ‘the very prototype of an unsuccessful middle-aged bachelor in a ...”

“... it as ‘vomit’. Nevertheless, helped by a determined defence from its British publisher, John Calder (who claimed to discern in Burroughs the James Joyce of our day), Naked Lunch went on to become a terrific post-Chatterley best-seller. The Place of Dead Roads is published with a grant from the Arts Council: a double seal of Establishment approval ...”

“... In 1851 the trade referred its dispute to a tribunal headed by the author and judge Lord John Campbell. His decision was delivered on 19 May 1852 and published in its entirety by the triumphant Times. Campbell came down uncompromisingly for free trade. The Regulations, they said, were indefensible, and contrary to the freedom which ought to prevail ...”

“... it’s the old story in nice new Faber covers. In essence, Peters aims to do for the life what John Carey did for the works with his applauded Thackeray, Prodigal Genius (1977): that is to say: re-tread familiar ground with brisk, commonsensical illumination. This she does well. Thackeray’s Universe is attractively written and profits the reader with a ...”

“... sick of being a person – Christopher Isherwood, or Isherwood, or even Chris,’ he had told John Lehmann a few years earlier. In America, both Auden and Isherwood would outgrow the need for ‘boys’. Between purging bouts of transcendentalism, Isherwood drank too much (although he was never, Parker insists, alcoholic) and did not succeed – beyond ...”

“... Robert Darnton’s reputation was founded on his monumental The Business of Enlightenment (1979). In this study of ‘the life-cycle of a single book’ Darnton tracked the creation, manufacture, distribution and reception of the fourth edition of Diderot’s Encyclopédie, 1775-1800. His account drew on the archive of the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel, on the Franco-Swiss border ...”

“... There are up to ten thousand American academics who could claim the job description ‘literary critic’ as they make their way to the annual convention of the Modern Languages Association. J. Hillis Miller is one of the handful who matter. Like those mystic few who know the Coca Cola formula, such people shouldn’t be allowed to travel on the same plane ...”

“... Field’s VN: The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov is a biography which can make one wonder what biography is all about. On the face of it, the book marks the end of a tempestuous literary love affair. As his publishers proclaim, Field has devoted his professional life to the study of Nabokov. His first book, Nabokov: His Life in Art (1967) stands as a landmark in its subject’s emergence from literary obscurity to literary respectability ...”

“... Who would have expected Louis de Bernières to follow up Captain Corelli’s Mandolin with the soft-centred biography of a lovable pooch? Red Dog could be seen as a reversion to national type – the English, Nabokov witheringly remarked, feel sorry for the blind man’s dog. And where there are soft spots, to coin a book-trade proverb, there’s hard cash ...”

“... With Wise Virgin, A.N. Wilson continues his bleak investigation of trauma. The Healing Art (his most acclaimed novel so far) scrutinised human sensibility under the sentence of terminal cancer. Wise Virgin takes the life term and solitary confinement of bereaved blindness. It’s played out with Wilson’s customary geometric neatness of design. Giles Fox, as the novel’s retrospect finds him, was once a fulfilled man – someone who could have represented the happy ending of some other story ...”