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“... being passed on to another. Phillips’s book has an urgency and intensity which demands that you read more: it is not so much a matter of enjoying it as feeling obliged to finish it, to take account of what the voices he has imagined have to say. Christopher Burns’s hero, Maurice Fretwell, now warden of a nature reserve somewhere on the north-west coast of ...”

“... world art’, but writing that tells you more than you can see for yourself and makes you want to read on is harder to come by. That is what Bell provides, with clarity and a wonderfully sustained faculty of response. A practical device he uses to carry you through is the long caption. He accepts that some readers will skim and dip; captions can offer a ...”

“... to Wilson: It is possible – admittedly by over-simplifying what the memorandum says – to read it as simply saying that the Americans are right, that the North Vietnamese are wrong and that there is nothing we can do about it … read in this sense, the memorandum might touch off a rather unprofitable discussion in ...”

“... that had remained forgotten and unread for fifteen hundred years. In City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish, Peter Parsons sets out to capture the experience of life in an Egyptian town under the Roman Empire. His aim is to reconstitute Oxyrhynchos from its waste-paper, to evoke ‘a virtual landscape which we can repopulate with living and speaking people’. Parsons ...”

“... is a different matter. Uncollected in the Faber anthology is a moment in Michael Wharton’s ‘Peter Simple’ memoir when one of the more heroic Fleet Street pub-performers kept a long-postponed appointment with his doctor. After tapping and humming away, the quack inquired mildly; ‘D’you drink at all?’ Well-primed for the routine, and knowing that ...”

“... It seems now that there was always something odd about Peter Robinson’s being the editor, in 1985, of Geoffrey Hill: Essays on His Work, from the Open University Press. Robinson’s sensibility, particularly as one had encountered it in his poems, pointed away from the aloofness of Hill’s attitude to his public, and away from Hill’s lofty and recherché diction, towards something plainer, more demotically awkward, more (the word presented itself) Wordsworthian ...”

“... out their fabric and warmth, where there was nowhere to fall ... I took up jigsaw puzzles, read mystical cricket thrillers passing all understanding, even collected toy soldiers and killed them with matchsticks fired from the World War One field-guns I bought from Peter Oborn down the road – he must have had ...”

“... or twenty pages long, often impress one as serious philosophical achievements even when they are read piecemeal, as they were written. But when they’re read together, one sees (what I, at least, hadn’t fully realised) that Davidson is a kind of bird that’s become rare almost to extinction: a systematic ...”

“... on the ceiling. ‘Absolutely not,’ I said when first approached, because I knew I would try to read everything, and fail, and spend days trying to write an adequate description of his nostrils, and all I would be left with after months of standing tiptoe on the balance beam of objectivity and fair assessment would be a letter to the editor from some guy ...”

“... on the House of Commons in the 1640s, on which Hexter’s best work was written, though Elizabeth Read Foster analyses ‘The Journal of the House of Lords for the Long Parliament’. There is nothing on Sir Thomas More. Few of the contributors are former pupils. The five most distinguished are neither pupils nor colleagues nor even Americans. A specially ...”

“... 4 January. A Christmas letter from Cami Elbow, wife of Peter Elbow, an American college friend who teaches English at Amherst: Life in Amherst is very placid. Even grammatically correct. In December the town decided to encourage shoppers to patronise the downtown stores with free parking. They ordered plastic bags to cover up the parking meters but the bags arrived with the message wrongly punctuated: ‘Season’s Greeting’s ...”

“... poetry,’ he tells us, ‘is not immune,’ and he asks rhetorically: who ‘can now read through the whole of The Faerie Queene with delight’?. Yet there are good poems with ostensibly dead subject-matter. For instance, Herbert’s ‘A Wreath’, which explores the Christian idea that humility contains a greater glory. For most non-Christian ...”

“... a reputation as Leftists. The two officers at the centre of this molehunt were Arthur Martin and Peter Wright. Wright was a brilliant scientist and a grammar-school patriot who always doubted the patriotism of his public-school superiors. He held extreme right-wing views. His devotion to rooting out Lefties at the top placed him at the head of the Fluency ...”

“... background information could not easily be found. In Patrick Power’s excellent translation I read The Poor Mouth (An Béal Bocht) with enjoyment but without suspecting that it was intended as a parody of a whole sub-genre of Gaelic misery memoirs. I read The Best of Myles through a fog of cheerful ignorance about the ...”

“... chess ... coming back in to write, for a few hours, in a language few around him could even read’, is also a part of this America, its reminder of what can now be forgotten. But all of this changes after 1956, when a new wave of Hungarian refugees arrives, among them the brilliant, hungry, ambitious young scholar ...”