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“... The subtitle claims that this is ‘the First Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess’, who is officially known as John Burgess Wilson; and the book appears on the author’s 70th birthday, as part of his preparation for the coming encounter with Big God. There is, however, to be a Second Part, provisionally entitled You’ve had your time; we are told it will probably be even longer than this one, which takes the younger Wilson from birth to a midlife illness, falsely diagnosed as fatal ...”

“... A.D. Nuttall is among the most erudite contemporary academic literary critics, at ease with the Classics, much given to philosophy. He is also disconcertingly bold and curious, and his latest book, like some of its predecessors, is as odd as it is learned. It begins, but by no means ends, with a minute enquiry into the expression in medias res. Horace observed that Homer, instead of starting his poem about the Trojan War from the beginning – ab ovo, Leda’s egg from which was hatched Helen of Troy – chose to rush his listeners ‘into the midst of things’, with a quarrel that occurred when the war had been going on for years ...”

“... This remarkable novel labours under what some might think serious disadvantages. First of all, at around four hundred thousand words it could be thought on the long side for a book principally concerned with the life of a PhD candidate from childhood to the age of thirty. This judgment could be disputed on the ground of generic precedent, the Bildungsroman habitually tending to length: but in these days blockbuster sizes tend to be associated either with the 19th century or with airport bookstalls, always excepting an occasional highbrow freak ...”

“... The publishers describe this book as ‘lean’, which may be taken to refer to its style, though it also serves as a euphemism for ‘very short, especially considering the price’. Its immediate predecessor was Underworld, about seven times as long (or as fat). That book, as nearly everybody must know, begins with a chapter about a famous baseball game and a boy who retrieves the ball with which the decisive home run was scored ...”

“... In this brilliant new book Kazuo Ishiguro maintains his preference for first-person narrative. The voice of both the first and last of this suite of five stories is that of a guitarist who plays in a café orchestra in the Piazza San Marco in Venice. He knows a lot about guitars and enough about the class of music appropriate to the setting. The first tale he tells concerns a crooner, and when he returns in the fifth, the least successful of the five, he is revealing an interest in the life of a classical cellist ...”

“... Malamud (though the resemblance doesn’t seem close) and Amy is imagined to be possibly Anne Frank, rescued and resettled in America. Strange identifications echo round Roth’s collected works, and they aid the creation of narrative and biographical ambiguities that serve to protect the freedom of the imagination. In The Facts, an autobiographical ...”

“... Henry Reed was a sad man but a funny man, and his poems are funny or sad – often, as in the celebrated ‘Lessons of the War’, both at once. I first met him in 1965, in the office of Robert Heilman, then the benevolent but firm head of the English Department at the University of Washington in Seattle. Calling to present my credentials, I walked into a row; Heilman benevolently firm, Reed furious, licensed to be furious ...”

“... A story can be told in almost any order except backwards. Gérard Genette’s impressive catalogue of ‘anachronies’, of all the ways you can destabilise or re-order narrative chronology, does not provide for the complete reversal of narrative flow. The White Queen claims that she lives backwards, and that her ‘memory works both ways’ – she remembers best the things that happened the week after next ...”

“... Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower is a historical novel based on the life of the poet, aphorist, novelist, Friedrich von Hardenberg, a Saxon nobleman who wrote under the name of Novalis and lived from 1772 to 1801. He figures largely in all accounts of the German literature of the time, and Georg Lukács is not much more extravagant than other critics in calling him the only Romantic poet ...”

“... Even if you enjoy Southern California as much as Reyner Banham you may still, like him, draw the line at those discreetly fenced-in and fortified cities in which the better-off sometimes choose to live, and at whose gates the visitor must check with the guardians before being allowed to enter. I recently spent a few days in one of these suburban paradises ...”

“... A great many Conrad letters have already been published, notably in Jean-Aubry’s Life and Letters, but also in smaller collections containing his correspondence with one or more persons – for example, Edward Garnett, William Blackwood and Cunninghame Graham. Early letters to Polish friends and relations have been translated, and a series of about a hundred to Marguerite Poradowska appeared in the original French ...”

“... All the signs, we are continually told, point to rapid economic recovery in the US, and the Stock Market, perhaps because of this iteration, moves almost daily to new record highs. But unofficial individuals seem cautious or sceptical. Friendly foreigners, especially if they knew this country a generation back, are likely to note the discrepancy between the adman bullishness of government spokesmen and a certain dour disenchantment that has persisted as an ingredient of the American mood during the post-Camelot, post-Watergate, post-Vietnam years ...”

“... Generationalism’, as Mr Wohl designates the practice of thinking about history and society in terms of the characteristics attributed, usually by themselves, to members of particular age-groups, is a conceptual device nobody seems to have studied very closely till the 19th century. Not, of course, that conflicts between youth and age hadn’t been noticed: ‘they hate us youth,’ as Falstaff remarked, thinking of his behaviour rather than his age ...”

“... This is the third and last volume of Roy Fuller’s memoirs, and it takes him up to the end of the war. It may sound ungracious, but I can’t help wondering why I find all three books so appealing that the strong implication of finality seems quite unacceptable. Though literate and pleasantly, even amusingly morose, these are not what are commonly called compulsive reads ...”

“... William Golding’s Rites of Passage, which appeared seven years ago, purported to be an account, by a young toff, good-natured but still wet behind the ears, of a voyage to Australia, around 1814, in a clapped-out English warship reduced to carrying emigrants. Keeping a journal for the amusement of his noble patron, he tells of a comical amorous adventure with an emigrant female, a patronising friendship with an ex-lower-deck first lieutenant (‘allow me to congratulate you on imitating to perfection the manners and speech of a somewhat higher station in life than you were born to’), and various puppyish acts of indiscipline and breaches of Naval etiquette which set him at odds with the captain ...”