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“... wrote to Felicia Browne in an attempt to initiate a friendship – which her mother discouraged. Feldman and Trinder have both suggested that Mrs Browne’s action saved her daughter from the dismal fate of Harriet Westbrook, Shelley’s first wife. But it seems unlikely that the organised, ambitious and Christian young poet would have been attracted to a ...”

“... I delight in a palpable imaginable visitable past – in the nearer distances and the clearer mysteries, the marks and signs of a world we may reach over to as by making a long arm we grasp an object at the other end of our own table ... We are divided of course between liking to feel the past strange and liking to feel it familiar.’ Thus Henry James in the Preface to The Aspern Papers, the germ of which was the story of an American Shelley-worshipper seeking out the eighty-year old Claire Clairmont to trick or wheedle her into handing over precious documents illuminating her youthful relations with Shelley and Byron ...”

“... which is nearly unbearable to read, when Roger has to go and help Verna with her little daughter, Paula, whom Verna, at the end of her tether, has hit once too often. Around the figure of the battered baby the rest of Roger’s Version falls into place. As I read Josef Skvorecky’s new novel, it occurred to me that, however else one might characterise Roger ...”