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“... is no preface, foreword, introduction or blurb, and nothing about the compiler. After the title-page come three impacted pages of copyright acknowledgments and then we are plunged straight into Ability, Abnegation, Abnormality and Abortion. However, if one seeks out the hardback edition, published not long ago, and is lucky enough to find it still wearing ...”

“... 48 poems; Peter Redgrove’s In the Hall of the Saurians, one year after its predecessor, has 34; Norman MacCaig’s Voice-over, three years on from his Collected Poems, has 58; Cat’s Whisker by Philip Gross (three years on) 41; Jouissance by William Scammell (two years) 38; Disbelief by John Ash (three years) 55; Ken Smith’s Wormwood, a collection of ...”

“... Has any other contemporary designer ‘signed’ as many cityscapes as Norman Foster? Perhaps no architect since Christopher Wren has affected the London skyline so dramatically, from the Swiss Re ‘gherkin’ to the new Wembley Stadium arch. Foster has a right to be immodest, and the Catalogue of his work is punctuated with adjectives like ‘first’ and ‘largest’, and verbs like ‘reinvent’ and ‘redefine ...”

“... Witness, a smashed face by Jenny Saville; and John Currin’s Rotterdam – pornography as Norman Rockwell might have painted it. There are installations, such as Damien Hirst’s table of surgical instruments below photographs of a smashed eye and smashed limbs. There are DVD projections and sculpture. This disparate collection has been selected (and ...”

“... godly Protestant monarch like James I. To hammer home the point, the 1611 book devoted a whole page to the royal arms, just like the big heraldic display which congregations would see proudly affixed to the wall of their parish church as they sat in their pews (in careful hierarchical arrangement), listening to the words of King James’s God. Very often ...”

“... and a numismatist, have been roped in to make further contributions in the shape of double-page ‘picture essays’ devoted to particular topics – though it should be said that Campbell and Wormald have themselves composed nine out of 19 of these. The main text is aimed at a fairly wide readership, but it also raises far-reaching issues. All three ...”

“... Norman Rush’s first novel, Mating (1991), is narrated by an unnamed 32-year-old female doctoral student in nutritional anthropology. It takes the cherished theme of a brilliant and independent woman’s search for a male partner worthy of her, and transplants it to a utopian matriarchal community in Botswana. For a man to recast Pride and Prejudice as a modern, feminist love affair, and then to set it in Africa, is a bold move, and neither the book’s reworking of the conventions of first-person narrative nor its relentlessly artificial language seem to owe anything to Rush’s immediate predecessors or contemporaries ...”

“... errors even in published books, and I have to tear myself from menus and noticeboards. A page of prose sprinkled with my little red marks can puff me up as a huge pile of ironing can, or a clean house, with their demonstrations of manifest virtue. I have known, and I have cleaned up. As soon as I began to teach children it became clear to me that ...”

“... much of his Polish material); the minute and meticulous tracings of Conrad’s every movement by Norman Sherry, who not only told us when Conrad was in, say, Bangkok, but on which side of which streets he walked along; the more contentious but informative work of Jerry Allen; the Jungian account of Conrad by Gustav Morf; the psychoanalytic biography by ...”

“... His plots are very tightly-laced and you cut at your peril. A snatch of dialogue or narrative on page 20 may be a plant for a twist in the story on page 220. Wodehouse himself could cut his novels when occasion demanded – i.e. when the payment for a shorter version was big enough. Sometimes top-paying American ...”

“... with time.’ Since In Cold Blood, murderers have been a staple of the non-fiction novel, from Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song to Gordon Burn’s horribly fascinating books about Peter Sutcliffe and Fred and Rosemary West. Andrew Hankinson’s new book dramatises the last days of Raoul Moat, the Newcastle bouncer and bodybuilder who in July 2010 ...”

“... Conrad is certainly not short of biographers, what with Baines’s book, Watt’s first volume, Norman Sherry’s Conrad’s Eastern World (1966) and Conrad’s Western World (1971), Jerry Allen’s The Sea Years of Joseph Conrad (1965), Karl’s vast and wrist-breaking thousand-page Life, and now Zdzislaw Najder’s ...”

“... simplicity itself as a disguise. What the wind blows away The wind blows back again is how Norman Nicholson ends a poem in his new collection, Sea to the West. The lines are perhaps low on witty morality, but their power is the greater for that: coming at the end of a description of weather over Black Combe (a recurrent point de repère of the ...”

“... to pass judgment on his behaviour as a whole, and then not doing so. A third of its front-page story on 7 October was devoted to the alleged security implications of the affair. The same day’s editorial dismissed this as cant and ‘an excuse for prurience’. The paper’s eventual decision was that Mr Parkinson had made a ‘sad and silly ...”

“... Mourns’, 17 September 1966) is a star cover. Younger readers may prefer a ghoulish photo of Norman Tebbit, the Tories’ ‘New Caring Face’ in 1986, and his prince-of-darkness bubble: ‘I can’t speak to you now. The sun’s coming up.’ But if a long-lost favourite is not on view at the exhibition, it can be found again on the Eye’s website, in ...”