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“... perspectives and responsibilities. If there were any doubt about that, the publication of Keane (Michael Joseph, £17.99), the autobiography of the Manchester United player, ghost-written by the footballer-turned-journalist Eamon Dunphy, would clear it up. The book has already been all over the newspapers, for a passage concerning Keane’s feud with ...”

“... been dropped, and Red Rabbit will be hopping its way up the bestseller lists in a matter of weeks (Michael Joseph, £18.99). Clancy rocketed to fame – the cliché isn’t inapt for such a notorious gizmologist, though he’d no doubt give you the make and serial number of the rocket in question – in the mid-1980s with his first novel, The Hunt for Red ...”

“... served by our own most recent literary hoax. I have before me a press hand-out from the firm of Michael Joseph: WE BELIEVE THAT NEVER BEFORE HAS A CELEBRATED WRITER OF FICTION SO SUCCESSFULLY DISGUISED HER IDENTITY AND CREATED SUCH AN EXPERIMENT IN PUBLISHING AND NEVER BEFORE HAS A WRITER AT THE HEIGHT OF HER POWERS WRITTEN TWO SUCH POWERFUL AND ...”

“... a Cassandra, a Louis MacNeice for the 21st century?This, I believe, is the case with Lawrence Joseph, whose A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems, is out this month (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $28). Joseph was born in Detroit in 1948, the son of Syrian and Lebanese immigrants. He studied literature in Michigan and then at ...”

“... is that he’s a die-hard monarchist, as he reveals in his memoir, A Royal Duty (Michael Joseph, £17.99), a book at once agonisingly boring and shamefully fascinating. Much the most interesting bits are the insights into such things as what the Queen has (or used to have) for breakfast: ‘one slice of granary toast, a smear of butter ...”

“... a recipe for stracciatella that trumps Jamie Oliver’s latest concept, 5 Ingredients (Michael Joseph, £26), by weaving magic out of three: boiling stock poured over a paste of eggs and pecorino romano. Perhaps in ten years’ time The Plagiarist in the Kitchen will look like the ‘anti-cookbook’ it claims to be. Grace Dent was recently ...”

“... Train-robber Biggs and murderer Boyle present in their testaments a challenge to our moral reflexes. Both authors have appalling records: South Londoner Biggs with countless petty interviews, conspiracy to commit biography, and now brazen autobiography executed in ruthlessly-priced hard-back, plus indecent exposure on a Sex Pistols waxing: Glaswegian Boyle with an audaciously publicised apologia here compounded in paperback, cold-blooded participation before the fact in a television film witnessed by millions of law-abiding citizens, and flagrant indulgence in the plastic arts (to wit, sculpture with a sharp instrument) under the very noses of the prison authorities ...”

“... often with non-publishing or foreign management at the highest level. Penguin, Hamish Hamilton, Michael Joseph, Frederick Warne and Longman – all once imprints with independent identities – now congregate within the Pearson group (best known for its ownership of the Financial Times). Random House UK (whose American parent was long since swallowed ...”

“... happy warrior of Volume One. To mark the difference of tone, or perhaps out of mere incompetence, Michael Joseph have arranged matters so that the two volumes don’t match, whether in dust jackets or out of them: clashing cloths, misaligned lettering, ill-assorted portraits. Only face up and side by side do they make a pair, as though the publisher ...”

“... how the screenwriter describes the whole occasion: When as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Ghost. Then Joseph her husband, being a just man, and not willing to make her a publick example, was minded to put her away privily. But while he ...”

“... that is both fluent and memorable. As a bonus, there is a section consisting of two poems by Joseph Brodsky – one on Cape Cod, the other on Venice. Translated by Hecht – better, it seems to me, than ever before – here are more of Brodsky’s short unrelated sentences following each other with uncompromising inventiveness and inquisitiveness. In his ...”

“... Yusuf ibn Ayyub, translates as ‘the king strong to save (the Faith), the honouring of religion, Joseph Jobson’, which seems to sum up his character and position. He was an oddly pragmatic hero for such epic times. Mr Finucane’s audience, again envisaged as wider than professional academia, is in no danger of missing the drama of the times. His is an ...”

“... Joseph Losey’s The Servant hasn’t lost any of its mystery over the years since 1963; it might even have gained a bit. This is odd because the film seems in many ways so obvious, giving off unmissable hints and signals at almost every moment. But then this obviousness itself is not what it seems to be. What’s obvious about the hints and signals is that this is what they are ...”

“... Logic is doubtless unshakeable,’ Joseph K. thinks towards the end of The Trial, ‘but it cannot withstand a man who wants to go on living.’ He is wrong, of course, since he is killed within a page by the brutal logic of the novel he is in. But there is a logic that resists such logic, and one of its masters is Joseph H ...”

“... pylons walking through the erasures in the Bayrischer Wald ... Once before, I left some lines of Joseph Roth bleeding on your desk: ‘I had no father – that is, I never knew my father – but Zipper had one. That made my friend seem quite privileged, as though he had a parrot or a St Bernard.’ All at once, my nature as a child hits me. I was a moving ...”