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“... Monday, you take the accordion out of its case in rain,                                              begin to busk. Tuesday, you complain that the raito sauce with your hake                                              is far too garlicky. Wednesday, you will be the boy arranging for his skateboard                                              to be tattooed with a skull ...”

“... Simon Armitage likes to have it both ways. He is the streetwise poet who is at home in a Radio 1 studio; but he is also the ambitious literary figure who aspires to ‘nothing less’ than a Nobel Prize. He is at ease with youth culture (‘I didn’t have a classical education of any type, so I tend to use characters from popular culture’), yet, far from stoking rebellion, he writes tenderly of his parents and looks up to Ted Hughes and W ...”

“... displace – a future biography without taking years to concentrate on a memoir? Seamus Heaney and Dennis O’Driscoll have found a good way. Stepping Stones is not quite Heaney’s autobiography: it is, instead, a long collection of interviews, revised collaboratively, in which Heaney describes each phase of his life. Only a poet of Heaney’s repute ...”

“... that is separate and a little sorrowing’, as Heaney put it once, a line quoted back at him by Dennis O’Driscoll in the epic 2008 book of interviews called Stepping Stones that will stand as a partial monument to both men. If Heaney – who, it turns out, fished only about a dozen times in his life – ever did any ‘Casting and Gathering’, it ...”

“... called an ‘Irish bull’. Heaney bought Glob’s book the year it appeared: opening it, he told Dennis O’Driscoll, the most assiduous of his very many interviewers, was ‘like opening a gate … the minute I opened it and saw the photographs, and read the text, I knew there was going to be yield from it.’Heaney had already been drawn to write ...”