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“... their subjects. I have something in common with Joyce, and with Wilde, is the modest assumption of Richard Ellmann. Max was a bit like me, implies Cecil. That brings them, and us, all the closer to the subject. It can also lead to misunderstanding. Oddly enough, as Cecil’s admirable biography shows, both he and Max understood Oscar Wilde a good deal better ...”

“... Brighton had several, and became the epitome of the beach. ‘You hear nothing and see nothing,’ Richard Jeffries wrote of Brighton’s beach in The Open Air (1885): It is perfectly comfortable, perfectly jolly and exhilarating, a preferable spot to any other. A sparkle of sunshine on the breakers, a dazzling gleam from the white foam, a warm sweet ...”

“... but extreme heresies of The Last Temptation of Christ. They are therefore attractive figures for Faber, who are launching a welcome new series of director-based film books (they have been publishing screenplays for some time). Since the mid-Seventies, Britain has been lamentably served in this respect, with the decline or disappearance of the main series ...”

“... number or address, as he moved from one friend’s house to another. If she went to his office at Faber and Faber, he would duck into the lavatory. Hoping to catch sight of him, she frequented performances of his plays. At the back of one theatre she was spotted carrying a sign that said: ‘I am the wife he ...”

“... of an excellent Radio 3 programme in 1999 and there is a fine introduction to it by N.H. Reeve and Richard Kerridge, Nearly Too Much (1995). For some, all this exposure, combined with a move to a ‘mainstream’ publisher, has been like Bob Dylan going electric, but it represents an opportunity for the most radically innovative poet now writing to extend his ...”

“... his tink tink, tink tinkbespeaking a familiarity with the science of iron-carbon alloysthe Chinese developed alongside the Dao,he’s believed to anticipate the licethat will infest his nest by stitching intoits brush-pile the egg sacs of lice-eating spiders.This ‘time-release packet’ is just one example of what Muldoon describes elsewhere in the collection as ‘future-proofing’ (‘Once we relied on a hoard//of seed that had been sacked/and saved ...”

“... up in Brixton, goes to Oxford, and later works in publishing (for an unnamed but unmistakable Faber, down to the Kundera lookalike chairman, Matthew Evans). After ten or fifteen years, she leaves London and moves to Devon with her daughter, where she begins to write. As Lowell said, ‘Why not say what happened?’ Or, from this book, a nod at ...”

“... glanced at the book’s title page might be forgiven for thinking it was edited by the head of Faber and Faber’s accounting department. Over and over, Eliot adds up sums, tots up finance, and laboriously thanks anyone who has sent him a cheque, typically for verse or prose, but sometimes just to help him along (as his ...”

“... remember how our poem went but it was made up of extremely well-known lines out of, I think, the Faber Book of Modern Verse. It might even have read: April is the cruellest month Because It makes me think Continually of those who were truly great So it’s no go My honey love, it’s no go my poppet It might even have been titled ‘Do not go gentle into ...”

“... iambs, to demonstrate ‘his dissidence from the state’. The preface to Paulin’s excellent Faber Book of Vernacular Verse explains his preference for demotic diction and the natural cadences of Hopkins and Christina Rossetti over upper-class dialects and iambic regularities. Like Donne, he is proud to be harsh. He won’t tell the reader what is meant ...”

“... its bibliophile vice-president, Gordon Ray) acquired the literary correspondence of the publisher Richard Bentley and Sons, principal purveyor of the three-decker novel to the Victorian reading public. At the same time, the British Library (with financial assistance from the Friends of National Libraries) took possession of most of Bentley’s ledgers and ...”

“... member of a big, effective clan bears out pretty well the sense implicit in her lightning sketch. Richard Perceval is the son of John, Robert’s youngest brother, who was also snubbed, patronised and cold-shouldered. Richard Perceval has written excellent studies, admirably researched, of A.E. Housman and of the Powys ...”

“... I, Muldoon’s critical pronouncements had always been a scarce commodity, not least in The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry with its notorious editorial no-show. His Clarendon Lectures are unlikely to mean that Muldoon will be knocking down the wall between poetry and prose, but at least they represent a courtesy visit to the genre next door. In ...”

“... not written into any contract: self-respect, stability, social standing. Work is ‘a road’, as Richard Sennett once wrote, ‘to the unification of the self’. Except that it doesn’t usually end up like that, which is the reason the next page of the Guardian has Jeremy Bullmore, a sage and doleful-looking ‘agony uncle’, fielding people’s problems ...”

“... Chadwyck-Healey’s only option was to negotiate with copyright-holders and pay publishers like Faber the going rate for all Auden, all Eliot, all Larkin, all Heaney. The dealings would have taken years, the final costs would have been astronomical, the restrictions crippling, and the price to the end-user prohibitive. Clearly at some future point the law ...”