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“... about Mother: these subjects are all touched on, or are present, in his early work but without Katherine Bucknell to assist us, we would be hard pressed to locate them, let alone make out a case for their huge personal significance. Auden trained himself as a poet as he might have trained himself to be an engineer. Now and then he worried that he was ...”

“... as of a theatrical performance, that works for him, and always the larger range he aspires to. As Katherine Bucknell suggests in her excellent introduction to the diaries, A Single Man, which Isherwood began writing in 1962, was ‘modelled on Mrs Dalloway, which Isherwood unreservedly praised that summer’. Woolf, he may have thought, was within his ...”

“... a memoir that is neither a diary nor a deliberately fictionalised autobiography. Lost Years, Katherine Bucknell tells us in her useful introduction, is part of ‘a major new phase – roughly the final third of his career – in which Isherwood moved away from semi-fictionalised writing towards pure autobiography’. ‘Pure autobiography’ is ...”

“... sketches rather than explanations of words. There are moments in the Introduction when Katherine Bucknall’s immersion in her subject combines with her eagerness to inform us to produce little flickers of unintentional comedy. ‘Hitler killed himself in April; Germany surrendered in May. Japan surrendered on 14 August, and nine days later, on 23 ...”

“... becoming Nigerian. So did Christopher Isherwood, on whom there is an uninspired contribution from Katherine Bucknell. Wendy Lesser remarks on what she sees as Penelope Fitzgerald’s uncanny ability to re-create alien cultures. In his deceptively off-the-cuff critical style, Michael Wood writes sensitively of Naipaul and Salman Rushdie, pointing out that ...”

“... The much gossiped about George Eliot absolutely hated the idea of people talking behind their hands. The year she took up with a married man was also the year Ruskin’s wife revealed her husband’s impotence during court proceedings. ‘Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of those who diffuse it,’ Eliot wrote ironically in Daniel Deronda ...”

“... Pound died in 1972; Auden, who was 22 years younger, in 1973. Both writers underwent the usual posthumous dip in attention and reputation. This familar dégringolade is a mysterious process, and one which seems much more arbitrary than the longer critical haul of a century or two. For instance, shares in Elizabeth Bishop (d. 1979) are at an all-time high, helped by the timely publication of her letters; while shares in Philip Larkin (d ...”