‘I find myself in 1985 refreshing my memory of 1937 and 1938 in an old commonplace book and very fragmentary diary. There are verses copied there which I must have chosen for their significance at these moments of my life: literary gossip, bizarre crimes and divorces wrenched from newspapers…and then suddenly the digging of trenches on Clapham Common.’ Plus Alice Munro, John Updike, Doris Lessing, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Marianne Wiggins.