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“... A week or two ago I reviewed a novel about rock-climbers. A very absorbing tale it was too, but specialised; and one was bound to say that to a reader wholly without interest in the technicalities of the sport it might well fall flat. How far can you go? is a novel about Catholics. There are more Catholics than rock-climbers, but even so their concerns are special ones, and it would seem on the face of it that the same limitations must apply ...”

“... I first met William Empson fifty years ago, when he was teaching in Japan and I in Singapore. I was rather frightened of him. Only about my own age, he was a great deal more sophisticated and infinitely more intelligent. It was plain that he didn’t suffer fools gladly, and in his presence I often felt rather a fool. He had an impatient way of being always two jumps ahead of you in any discussion ...”

“... The state of chronic hypochondria in which literary education subsists shows no sign of abating. Indeed, in some quarters it is entering an acute phase. Regular and formerly healthful activities lose their zest, attacked by morbid depression of spirits. The milder forms of therapy effect little improvement, and a battery of fantastic remedies is brought to bear, which in spite of energetic promotion do not seem able to establish themselves ...”

“... The remarkable literary career of Richard Adams began only eight years ago, but it has already reached substantial dimensions. Watership Down in 1972 was followed by two other works of mystery and imagination, relying more or less heavily on the animal world, and now by The Girl in a Swing, which is ostensibly about human beings. These are not the skimpy, slimmed-down fictions so general today, but highly-worked, close-packed narratives, each of four hundred pages or more ...”

“... Thoughtful as always about how to win friends and influence people, Geoffrey Grigson in his latest book of poems congratulates himself that his elderly eyes If they remain alert Do the more easily recognise Squirming in his primal dirt Another verse-reviewing squirt. Well, it is nice to know where we stand, and after that rousing salute the most scrupulous reviewer need not be afraid of disturbing cultural harmony or bruising the petals of a sensitive plant ...”

“... Americans who fetch up there. In spite of superficial similarities, it is a blacker world than Graham Greene’s. Greene’s sombre chiaroscuro has its passages of chiaro among the obscurity: here there are virtually none – the one redemptory gleam being the fatal and useless gallantry of the young nun. But we are not assisting at a moral drama: it is ...”

“... Belfast stands for boredom, frustration, suffocating routine, aborted loves and fetid pieties. Graham Greene is quoted as saying that Brian Moore is his favourite living novelist, and one can see why. All those Pelagian notions anathema to Mr Greene – that man might save himself by his own efforts, or improve his arrangements for living in the world ...”

“... For readers who are more interested in literature than in literary society those sacred monsters who live in anecdote and legend rather than in their work are always something of an embarrassment. Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil Nor in the glistering foil Set off to th’world, nor in broad rumour lies – or at least it ought not to be; and how is the perfect witness of all-judging Jove to manifest itself if the object under inspection is perpetually obscured by a cloud of gossip, role-playing and myth-mongering? Writers of indubitable greatness have been distorted by their legend, like Dr Johnson and Byron ...”

“... This is John Updike’s first collection of stories for seven years. There must have been problems, he says, to account for such a long delay. His preface glances ruefully at some of them – social and political disquiets between 1971 and 1978; but, in fact, the stories hardly move into the public domain. One of them is actually called ‘Problems’, and is cast in the form of exam questions ...”

“... John Cheever’s two celebrated novels, The Wapshot Chronicle and The Wapshot Scandal, are now reissued in one volume. In this form, we can see that the two are really one and the end was always implied in the beginning. We are often told that the American novel is not very deeply rooted in the social world, that in a society so fluid and so quickly changing fiction hardly has time to take stock of the way things actually work and tends to blow up into some kind of surreal fantasy ...”

“... dominated by macho violence and the cruelty of the elements. It comes with a recommendation by Graham Greene who says: ‘The story held me so completely ... I wish I had written this book.’ At first, this is a little surprising – for the adultery that triggers off the action is an ordinary American adultery, without sacrilegious or metaphysical ...”

“... There has been an abundance of good critical writing about Thomas Hardy, from Lionel Johnson in 1894 to our own day, but his biography has been in a curious condition from the start. The authorised version (Early Life, 1928; Later Years, 1930) is supposed to be by Florence, his second wife, but is wholly composed from notes by Hardy himself, and for the most part actually dictated by him ...”

“... In the 30th chapter of the second book of Don Quixote the Don and Sancho encounter a certain duchess who thereafter plays a considerable part in their adventures. In The Duchess’s Diary Robin Chapman imagines her to have been an actual person, who had met not the fictitious Quixote but the real Cervantes; and the diary, supposedly translated from the original MS, tells her story ...”

“... The four novels before us are all highly original, but they tend to confirm an old popular belief – that there are two sexes and that there are some differences between them. All end sadly, in moods of more or less fatalist acceptance: but the spheres of their sorrow are divided on strictly traditional lines by the gender of their authors – the cannon and the firing-squad against the drawing-room and the kitchen stove ...”

“... Way back, when the century was in its early prime, we used to have Outlines of Everything. The archetype was the Outline of Modern Knowledge, but there were lots of others. I can see them still, pointing steadily leftwards, very long on tendencies and rather short on facts; those diagrams of a pig’s uterus that were supposed to teach us all about sex; those maps, full of trends and lines of force but most of the actual place-names missed out ...”