“... and the disintegration of the unified character with their overview, their version of unity (a self-mocking unity, full of pratfalls but nonetheless reassuring). In this novel humour is not the medium in which everything is suspended, it’s intermittent and not to be relied on, or possibly so black it’s hard to recognise. Jenny Diski’s oeuvre to date ...”

“... A chorus of woe prompted by the recession of 1980? No, all remarks made in 1948, and quoted by Robert Hewison in his forthcoming cultural history of the period, In Anger. Publishers are like farmers. When times are good – as they were spectacularly during the years after 1974 when the pound was weakest abroad – it’s difficult to get them to admit ...”

“... moving – especially, here, the love poems, or rather the poems of separation, and the occasional self-contained play of imagination, like ‘Truce’, a recreation of the Christmas fraternisation between British and German troops in 1914. Thomas Kinsella is the kind of poet you either can or can’t take. He is very strong meat. After an auspicious ...”

“... to be reversed. It is a love letter by an aging and ailing man in a world which valued dignity and self-control. Clearly, if things had gone better, the new house in St David Street would have had a mistress. The added material in the book does not really justify the title of a new edition, since it could well have been put across within a learned article, and ...”

“... of Colin and Caroline, holidaying in Venice, attracts the fascinated attention of the sadistic Robert, who has already nearly killed his wife during their sado-masochistic sexual sessions, and eventually succeeds in calmly murdering Colin. In The Innocent the engagement night of Leonard, the callow English hero, and his German lover Maria, is interrupted ...”

“... and curves and flat, bright colours; the subversion of women as mothers or sex objects; Warholian self-promotion and self-mythologising; the refusal of perspective (in both senses). And also a quality that runs through all her work which you might call childlike ...”

“... measure of admiration as a scholar, a lawyer, a writer and a politician; for there is much in Robert Bolt’s adulatory A Man for All Seasons which reflects what we know of More. But More was not simply a principled Catholic; he was also something of a fanatic. The Victorian historian J.A. Froude described him as a merciless bigot. He described himself in ...”

“... riff about being cheered for breaking wind in the street (after hours of Wagner): ‘Then a self-important thought came in my mind. Supposing that they knew this old man walking along Long Acre and farting was Stephen Spender – what would they think?’ Leavis, he reckoned, would not have been amused. This is not the utterance of the goose or juggins ...”

“... full of my conflicting emotions towards my homeland. Nostalgia, longing, but also fear and self-loathing and darkness – all those things are contained in this tiny piece. I did not realise this when I painted it many years ago. When one is young’ – he raised his eyebrow and turned to look at Margaret – ‘one does not see such things. But ...”

“... to be their best and most enduring. Fulcrum also published two important early collections by Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg’s Ankor Wat and, most significantly, two volumes by Lorine Niedecker, North Central and My Life by Water, and George Oppen’s Collected Poetry. Of British poets, apart from Bunting, Montgomery published four collections by Roy ...”

“... about its anxieties, distortions and deformations, was The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressel, which until the mid-1980s every trade unionist, Labour Party member and left-leaning student in Britain could safely be said to have read, or at least heard of. Then in 1984 everyone put it down and picked up Money. For the benefit of anyone too ...”

“... exasperating in itself. Dunthorne realises it isn’t a work of record but a chunk of tendentious self-representation. The dead are no less cunning than the living. ‘If the narrator of the memoir was the ideal part of himself,’ Dunthorne asks, ‘then where had Siegfried hidden the rest?’Unforthcoming about the important stuff, Siegfried is elsewhere ...”

“... Alderman is a member of the community he describes and his book can be read as a collective self-portrait – presented from an inward-looking, religiously Orthodox, politically conservative and rather philistine perspective. Modern British Jewry has little to say about anti-semitism or assimilation, both of which, without distinction, it sees merely as ...”

“... these novels so brilliantly funny – a lucid and ironic awareness of how pointless and manic and self-centred this talk is. Talk is a kind of doomed buffoonery, wearing funny clothes and taking tumbles because it doesn’t know how to get another job, or if there is another job, anywhere. The books are crowded with voices and short on punctuation, but are ...”

“... it contains some lively and interesting passages, it has to be treated with caution as largely self-serving. All this is changing on direct orders from the top. About a year ago, Eduard Shevardnadze, Gromyko’s successor at the Soviet Foreign Ministry, assembled his entire staff to listen to a remarkable in-house address, lasting several hours, in which ...”