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“... There is a point in Stanley Middleton’s Blind Understanding at which a man does not eat a dry biscuit. Listening to the sound of the nine o’clock television news from the distance of his kitchen, a 70-year-old retired solicitor remarks his immunity to the sad record of violent death, industrial disorder and foreign famine in worlds elsewhere. ‘Such did not touch him nearly; he could be disgruntled without adventitious help ...”

“... In what is by far the most rewarding item in Calder’s New Writing and Writers 19, the main character of Harry Mulisch’s ‘Antique Air’ thinks of the war as ‘an almost impenetrable barrier of death, fear, hunger’, separating him from his childhood. Yet paradoxically, the war is ‘perhaps his most precious possession, without which he can hardly imagine himself ...”

“... but Robert Lowell needs ‘liberum’ to rhyme with ‘rhythm’ at the end of the next line). Adrian Poole and Jeremy Maule allow themselves a similar donnish sharp intake of breath, in their Introduction, at the notorious howlers of Ezra Pound. The compilers of the Oxford Book have made an admirable collection for our time. Presumably, with the ...”