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“... particularly liked the essay by Alistair Stead on the art of naming in the fiction of Henry Green. Glyn Hughes’s creative personality contrasts sharply with David Storey’s. Where Storey draws his imaginative sustenance from what’s under his nose, and achieves his subtlest effects through a notation of the banal which salvages our most routine acts ...”

“... Glyn Hughes’s novel, Where I Used to Play on the Green, won both the Guardian Fiction Prize and the David Higham Fiction Prize in 1982, yet it received not a tenth of the publicity awarded to winners of the Booker and the Whitbread. This is a pity, for it is a fine achievement, although too dour a story to command affection in the media ...”

“... insists on an immense, primal separation: it is what allows them to say, for instance, that Glyn Maxwell’s gifts go beyond ‘the merely literary’. But then language itself, on the editors’ account, is a poor thing. Ian McMillan’s work is praised for treating language ‘with a healthy Post-Modern disrespect’; ...”

“... yet, far from stoking rebellion, he writes tenderly of his parents and looks up to Ted Hughes and W.H. Auden. Asked to nominate his Book of the Century last year, he plumped for Waiting for Godot. The idea of Armitage in Beckettian exile, refusing to grant media interviews, is about as plausible as ‘Chaucer at his laptop,/auto-checking his ...”

“... a stone or in a factual document, the search for her leads only to dreams and fantasies. Bettany Hughes attempted an archaeological quest in her Helen of Troy (2005), but was left wistfully hoping that Helen’s tomb might be discovered one day. Maguire finds traces of Helen of Troy everywhere, far beyond the poems and plays in which she is a character, but ...”