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“... Monday 23 November 1953: Tonight I watched on television the departure of the Queen and Prince Philip from London Airport. It was immensely moving. The Queen looked so young and vulnerable and valiant, and Prince Philip so handsome and cheerful. A truly romantic couple, star quality in excelsis. True glamour without any ...”

“... Hull, across the river from his home town. There, supported by colleagues like Richard Hoggart and Philip Larkin, he founded Critical Quarterly, a journal which continues to appeal to a mixed audience of schoolteachers and professional academics. After a year at Berkeley, during which his classes were disrupted by the Free Speech Movement, Cox returned to a ...”

“... months, with the diary unreadable (and illegible). Blame the anaesthetic.4 July. A letter from the Philip Larkin Society, reminding me that I’m an honorary vice-president, which I was unaware of. I’ve never been an enthusiastic member, partly because Larkin wasn’t particularly keen on my stuff or keen on my being keen on his (which I am); Amis (K.) very ...”

“... and narcotic: ‘The yellow winter days arrived, filled with boredom. A threadbare tablecloth, too short and pocked with holes, covered the rust-coloured earth … The days hardened from cold and boredom like last year’s loaves of bread. They were cut open with dull knives, without appetite, with a lazy somnolence.’ The way Schulz’s narrator sums up the ...”

“... makes one laugh a good deal more, or more festively, than most festschrift items do. In short, Larkin at Sixty gets a lot of different kinds of readableness into not much more than a hundred pages. But Alan Bennett’s question, which might be paraphrased as ‘What is Larkin at Sixty for?’, has a point: the book has problems a biscuit barrel ...”

“... grumps – McCarthy to Edmund Wilson, who locked her in a room to force her to write, Sontag to Philip Rieff, the sociologist she met as a student at 17 and with whom she later co-authored Freud: The Mind of the Moralist – and Sontag took over McCarthy’s old lemonade stand as Partisan Review’s theatre reviewer. Lines of succession make for neat ...”

“... a desolate and grilling public garden, and the sea full of floating brown pennies of oil. This short passage shows a spontaneous poetic flair rarely equalled in Forster’s fiction, or elsewhere in the diaries: ‘those trudging squares and triangles’, both exact and subjective, the complex social irony of the ‘natives grading into Portuguese without ...”

“... himself to eliminate the sheep. Murakami’s hunch-playing detective wears the mantle of Philip Marlowe a little self-consciously. He’s memorised the murderer’s name in every Ellery Queen mystery, advises people to ‘tell it to me straight, because that’s my favourite angle,’ and specialises in the sardonic wisecrack (a mother and child ...”

“... overall effect as the blurb-writer would have us believe. Heaney’s strength resides still in the short lyric, of which a group of 25 makes up the first part, and, I believe, the core, of the collection. Here Heaney has managed to give a further resonance to his precise descriptions of ‘small’ fixtures of the physical world:When I poured itit had a ...”

“... plus the non-fiction Raw Spirit: In Search of the Perfect Dram (2004), and the usual amount of short stories, introductions, articles and ephemera. He began with The Wasp Factory in 1984, and never stopped. His final novel, The Quarry, was almost complete by the time he received his cancer diagnosis in March this year. He died on 9 June. ‘On the morning ...”

“... work.’ That may be why his new collection begins in 1979, omitting as much of his published short fiction as it includes. The culture had changed, and so had DeLillo’s writing. The hippies of the hinterlands and the freaks in Times Square had ceded their place at the centre of cultural attention to yuppies, and by the time of ‘Creation’, the first ...”

“... mistakenly thought might be renewed and fortified, disappeared from view.’ It was Fascism, in short, which helped to close down the Criterion, a point overlooked by those for whom Eliot and his magazine were themselves of this persuasion. In fact, Eliot was not a Fascist but a reactionary, a distinction lost on those of his critics who, in the words of ...”

“... a reprint of the 1974 volume of that name, which is now out of print, is a sequence of 40 short or shortish poems lacking the manifest philosophical concerns of the poems that precede it. It offers itself as an easy, even casual topographical record of England, county by county in alphabetical sequence, almost like an ‘Oxford Book’. But this is in ...”

“... the fourth piece – I missed it. Could you get it for me?’ I sent it over that evening. In a short while he called back to ask that I talk to Newman and obtain, as hypothetically as possible, his estimate about Cuban response to an invasion.Allowing for Schlesinger’s retrospective, self-serving grace-notes (one has to love the placing of the word ...”

“... reworked by later authors, the subject could also be approached as a history of reception. Philip Hardie’s impressively learned Celestial Aspirations touches on all these aspects, with an emphasis on reception history. As a Latinist, he is interested in the long afterlife of classical myths, themes and images of celestial ascent, and traces them ...”