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“... a joke. They had left the notes everywhere and they were full of misspellings and pretensions. Helen’s mother has a terminal illness – no wonder Helen is ‘having a rough time of it’. Mother and daughter alternate between considerateness and bickering, confrontation with what is happening and evasion of it. The ...”

“... Helen​ Frankenthaler is best known for her vivid, large-scale ‘soak-stain’ paintings, which initiated the colour field works of the so-called second generation Abstract Expressionists. She claimed that her visit to Jackson Pollock’s exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1950 changed her sense of what could be done with colour, space, line and movement – and convinced her of the value of allusiveness over narrative ...”

“... by a Japanese company and then, finally, Hollywood. All believed that they had exclusive rights. A small London company, Walberry Productions, which specialises in natural history films, had actually made two documentaries with the help of the KGB. The first, Comrade Philby, went out in May 1990. The second, Strange Neighbours, about the American spy ...”

“... were executed after 1939, including Iniesta’s father, who had been the socialist mayor of a small town; up to a million men, women and children were sent to jails and work camps, as Iniesta was, or suffered other forms of preventive detention and punishment. But still far less known outside Spain is the other side of that story: how Franco achieved this ...”

“... can console,’ concludes the title-poem of Sea Grapes (1976). ‘But not enough.’ Gros-Ilet, a small village on the St Lucian coast, is the main setting for Omeros, Walcott’s most extended and schematic exorcism of history and mythology. The poem is – to borrow Paul Zweig’s phrase for ‘Song of Myself’ – a ‘therapeutic epic’. Each of its ...”

“... But Larkin’s fiercely minimal 1955 version of it is. ‘Counting’ austerely allows itself only small words; small lines (of two beats or three); small units (couplets); small rhymes (monosyllables, all but one); invariant and insistent appearances of ...”

“... novelist, John Galt, had a gift for encapsulating disgrace under pressure, and his novels of small-town Scottish life are among the early masterpieces of British political fiction. After a life of robust colonial effort, during which he founded the Canadian city of Guelph, Galt – exhausted and impoverished – came back to Greenock and died there in ...”

“... especially in wartime, as an extraordinary occupation, which should not be scrutinised too hard. Helen Parr’s book is, in part, an attempt to describe how this change came about, through the history of a once infamous, now mythologised section of the army, the Parachute Regiment. The book is also a symptom of that change. Parr isn’t an ex-servicewoman or ...”

“... of the Female Sex. He was not in my picture a man attractive to women. The red-faced, jowly, small-eyed Professor von X is angry: he feels threatened in postwar, post-female-suffrage Britain by the loss of a feminine mirror in which to glimpse his own superiority. Woolf is angry too and her anger is similar to the anger that radiates from the work of ...”

“... book of American peregrinations, Hunting Mister Heartbreak, Jonathan Raban fetches up amid the small, insular community of Guntersville, Alabama, where he meets a young motel-owner called Tim. Tim is writing a novel. Raban is consulted for a professional opinion of the work in progress, and with commendable grace he identifies the strengths of this driven ...”

“... Helen​ Phillips’s disconcerting new novel starts on a note of thrillerish urgency. Molly, at home alone with her small children, hears footsteps in the other room. She clasps them to her, though she needs to move away from them if she is to defend them. Ben, the baby, is too young to feel a sense of emergency, but Viv, at three, is old enough both to co-operate and to do the opposite of what she’s told ...”

“... Helen Oyeyemi’s​ latest novel, Parasol against the Axe, opens with a playful monologue from its narrator, the city of Prague. Prague has recently found its way – ‘who knows how’ – into a WhatsApp group ‘set up as a safe space for sharing complaints about the capital city of Czechia’. ‘Some of the incidents referred to had taken place many years ago,’ it explains ...”

“... surveys, the 1500 poets here included will have shrunk to about fifty, and a good thing too. The small ‘mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease’ has now swollen to a throng of men and women who write with intent, and this reader, at least, shrinks before the sheer weight of publication represented by these 1500 writers of verse. Hamilton has included short ...”

“... is made to fit a paradigm of feminist outrage. This results in some missed opportunities, as in a small but significant moment when Pilkington quotes Milton’s ‘Il Penseroso’ to an English schoolmaster with whom she carried on a flirtatious correspondence two years before her death. Contemplating the thought of seeing her literary lover in the ...”

“... on anyone’s Parnassus’. This seems right to me – especially the ‘uncategorised’. The small tally of Edith Sitwell’s best poems has suffered from the attempt to put them into the accepted pigeon-holes of modern poetry – slots into which they do not fit. When you react against the Georgians you are supposed to turn into T.S. Eliot, and it is a ...”