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“... Staying in Castries for the wedding was a young man called Mr Kennaway. When he watches me I can see that he doesn’t think I am pretty. Oh God, let me be pretty when I grow up. Jean Rhys was 12 at the time of the wedding in Castries, on the island of St Lucia. At the age of six a photograph had been taken of her: she looked very pretty then in a new white dress ...”

“... and so on. This is a trick which more and more self-styled humourists are employing these days: Sue Town-send in the Adrian Mole enterprises uses the same device. It relies on the assumption that if you drop the name of something terribly contemporary, like a Well Woman Clinic or a nose stud, everyone who picks it up will be so impressed by their own Fleet ...”

“... Fire Station it was taught by, among others, a remarkable woman who I think was the choreographer Sue MacLennan. If Cunningham was about mastering the body’s weight, Release was about giving in to it. There were still strings attached to the room around you, but instead of suspending you along some taut vertical axis and helping you keep centred, these ...”

“... even something you didn’t particularly wish to know.The entries under ‘S’ in the index of Sue Black’s new book, Written in Bone, include ‘Stevanin, Gianfranco, Monster of Terrazzo’ (seven page mentions); ‘stillborn babies’ (six); ‘strangulation’ (six); and ‘strappado’ (two). In the section for ‘D’ I found the sequence ‘diploic ...”

“... a selection of her stage revues, hit predictable targets and predictable rhymes. Peter Davidson is something else again, a poet seeking consciously to revive the ‘Inglis’ (i.e. Scots) tongue. His small pamphlet includes a ‘gutter song’ but there is nothing populist about the writing. Davidson is an ...”

“... to ‘find a way to deal with this erotic element’ – indeed, the poet’s widow threatened to sue him if he kept on trying. His biography of Tate remains unwritten, and this – in view of his juicy prospectus – seems a pity. Instead, we must make do, at least for the time being, with Thomas Underwood’s immensely detailed and tirelessly literary ...”