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“... Ma,​ as everyone calls her, is exasperating to her family. Eighty years old and recently widowed, she refuses to get out of bed. Despite the entreaties of her son Bade (in whose Delhi house she lives), and pleas from her daughter Beti, daughter-in-law Bahu and grandson Sid, she lies with her face to the wall, as if readying herself for death. After 170 pages of inactivity, she’s more than a little exasperating to the reader, too ...”

“... Aprivileged Westerner​ arrives in a foreign country – for a jaunt or a holiday or to escape the past. Through a naive or arrogant disregard for the indigenous culture, he or (just as often) she runs into serious trouble, implicated in a death for which, eventually, a debt must be paid. The setting is luxurious, the lifestyle hedonistic, the climate oppressively hot ...”

“... The success​ of Paul Harding’s first novel, Tinkers (2009), is the kind of good luck story worth passing on to any dispirited author. When Cold Water Flat, the band he drummed with in the 1990s, broke up after touring the US and Europe, he studied creative writing at the University of Iowa, under the tutelage of (among others) Marilynne Robinson ...”

“... The ‘Red Death’ had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal ... Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ I were just cleaning up streets our kid. Just cleaning up streets. Peter Sutcliffe to his brother Carl: Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son by Gordon Burn Ower t’ills o Bingley Stormclouds clap an drain, Like opened blood-black blisters Leakin pus an pain ...”

“... There are grounds for thinking Tony Harrison the first genuine working-class poet England has produced this century. Of course, poets from D.H. Lawrence to Craig Raine can boast a proletarian background, but their poetry isn’t usually interested in doing so – not at its most characteristic and not to an extent that would make the term ‘working-class poet’ a useful one ...”

“... All day​ it has rained,’ goes a poem written by Alun Lewis in 1941, while he was stationed with the Royal Engineers in Hampshire, ready for war but not yet called to action. It’s a poem about being bored and being grateful for the boredom since worse is to come. ‘We talked of girls and dropping bombs on Rome.’ Beyond the humdrum detail – groundsheets, dirty socks, Woodbines – the mood is ominous ...”

“... The acrimony in Michael Hofmann’s book is that of a son towards his father. Like a family photograph album, the sequence ‘My Father’s House’ records the son’s growth from childhood to manhood, and the father’s from early to late middle age: each poem denotes some new phase, and usually low point, in the relationship. The father’s absences and absent-mindedness, his tempers, adulteries and workaholism, his patronising of his wife and children – these sins and omissions are meticulously totted up ...”

“... Why is cricket so appealing to playwrights – English and Irish ones anyway? Samuel Beckett represented his university against Northants. Harold Pinter, who wrote wistfully of seeing Len Hutton in his prime, captained a team called the Gaieties XI. Simon Gray, David Hare and Ronald Harwood are or were known to be keen on the game, too. And Tom Stoppard, another follower, has a striking set-piece in The Real Thing in which a playwright, explaining dramatic technique, says: ‘What we’re trying to do is to write cricket bats ...”

“... How much do love and sex have in common? Not enough, it seems, for them to appear together in anthologies, which increasingly cater either for the sentimental or the pornographic market. We need not be surprised by this. Men, at any rate, have often maintained that sexual intercourse may occur without any undue engagement of the emotions, just as love need not hinder the serious business of living and working and getting on ...”

“... Confessional writers​ stake everything on their truth-telling. ‘I have displayed myself as I was,’ Rousseau says, promising ‘a portrait in every way true to nature’, a claim echoed by W.N.P. Barbellion when he writes: ‘My journal keeps open house to every kind of happening in my soul.’ But Rousseau was guilty of certain economies and the last words of The Journal of a Disappointed Man – ‘Barbellion died on December 31’ – are a lie: when the book came out 15 months later, in March 1919, the author was still around to read the reviews and bemoan their predictability: ‘One writes that it is a remarkable book ...”

“... Richard Ford​ is sceptical about character. He thinks it changeable, provisional, unpredictable, irresolute and ‘decidedly unwhole’, which makes things tricky for a novelist. You send a man to see his girlfriend in the expectation that she’ll dump him and she tells him how sweet he is. You don’t know where you are with people. They don’t know where they are themselves ...”

“... As​ well as survivor’s guilt there is the guilt of the non-combatant – the shame of missing out, a feeling experienced even by those who, for reasons of age, could never have taken part. The interwar generation of British writers (those, like Auden and Isherwood, too young to serve in the First World War) suffered from this. When the Spanish Civil War broke out, their main impetus for engaging with it, at the front or in print, was anti-Fascism ...”

“... Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged,’ Virginia Woolf wrote, disparaging the kind of fiction associated with Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy and H.G. Wells. It’s a proposition that might appeal to Simon Okotie. But before deciding whether it has merit he would want to see whether an apparently symmetrical arrangement of gig-lamps might not, on close examination, prove ever so slightly asymmetrical and as such bear some relation to life ...”

“... Jon Fosse​ doesn’t use sentences, or prefers not to end them. When you open Septology, with its smallish print and narrow margins, it can feel like a death sentence – all the more so since the book, much possessed with death, runs to more than eight hundred pages. There are no paragraphs or full stops here. Fosse has called the writing ‘slow prose’ and it lingers on moments – hours even – when nothing much happens, as the main character, Asle, sits gazing at the fjord beyond the window or at the painting he’s just finished (‘two lines that cross in the middle’, one purple and one brown), with little to record except how tired he’s feeling or what he thinks of his annoying neighbour Åsleik, a farmer, who calls on him every day ...”

“... Now that poetry has been brought into the marketplace, and publishers have discovered how to make a modest profit from it, and now that publication outlets can be found in any good-sized store, so productivity levels in British poetry have increased dramatically. Most poets these days publish a new collection of thirty or forty poems every three or four years; some are more industrious than even that ...”