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“... The easy truism, that a good children’s book is a book that’s good for children too, has enough truth in it to ensure that most fiction reviewers are at least open to the genre. But unless we specialise in children’s fiction, the current literary theory about it is likely to interest only some and only at specific times: those of parenthood and of grandparenthood ...”

“... with the completion of Janet Todd’s seven-volume edition of The Works of Aphra Behn for Pickering and Chatto) confirms the scribbler’s accession to the status of a fully-fledged Author. Todd’s labours complete a process of canonisation so dramatic that it has itself become an object of study (there is, for example, an Open University textbook ...”

“... putting Defoe onto the library shelf in properly annotated form as general editors of the ongoing Pickering & Chatto edition of Defoe’s works (44 volumes, but still only ‘selected’). The annotation of almost any of Defoe’s writings from the first two decades of the 18th century takes such lengths of political explanation that the fashioning of a clear ...”

“... informed. As to the third text, the editor simply goes limp. He tells us almost nothing of Dr Samuel Parr, nor of his offending sermon, nor of his previous associations with Godwin, and almost nothing of Sir James Mackintosh’s influential refutal of the ‘new philosophy’. At £395 the reader expects a little more. But the real test for an editor is ...”