Ian Sansom

This is the end of something – although of what exactly it’s not quite clear. The death of D.J. Enright, in December 2002, makes one ask some serious questions about poets and about critics. To put it bluntly: there will be no more books from Dennis Enright. Does it matter? Should we be sad? Should we be bothered?

Writing in the LRB just over twenty years ago, the near-omniscient...

“Betjeman: New Fame, New Love is, then, quite a marvellous thing, and in several senses perverse. There is a lot of murk in it, because there’s an awful lot of murk in any life, if you look close enough and long enough, and poets are dirtier than most people, although with Betjeman perhaps the stains stand out more, in a public life of proverbial white-suited and baggy-trousered gentility.”

According to Henry James, reviewing John Cross’s life of George Eliot,

the creations which brought her renown were of the incalculable kind, shaped themselves in mystery, in some intellectual back-shop or secret crucible, and were as little as possible implied in the aspect of her life. There is nothing more singular or striking in Mr Cross’s volumes than the absence of any...

Tony Parsons is the talented journalist who used to play Leonard Bast to Tom Paulin’s rentier intellectual on Late Review, the BBC’s weekly parade of Schlegelisms. He was the mean little man with the Estuary accent who was entitled to his views. He currently writes a column for the Mirror and his opinions spill forth also now in novels. ‘The problem these days is not getting...

There are those who like to mortise a plot, carefully and neatly, and there are those who are content simply to bang it together with panel pins and a tube or two of Gripfill. Jonathan Coe is undoubtedly the craftsman – a counter-sinking, dove-tailing, professional-finishing kind of writer. But he does get away with the occasional bodge. The framing device for his new novel, The...