Seneca said in On the Shortness of Life, ‘It is not that we have so little time but that we lose so much.’

In 2019 the Emilia Report (named after England’s first published female poet, Emilia Bassano) analysed coverage of male and female writers and found that women were twice as likely to have their ages referenced – or, in the case of Sally Rooney, her appearance, ‘like a startled deer with sensuous lips’, according to one Swiss critic.

One of my favourite blurb descriptions of a character is of Count Fosco in The Woman in White: ‘who has a taste for white mice, vanilla bonbons and poison’. No need for a ‘sinister’ at all there. Another is on Patrick Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude, which tells us that a young woman in a boarding house ‘pecks at spam and mashed potato by night’,

Italo Calvino: ‘A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.’

For example, the title page for a 1672 reprint of a book called The Famous Game of Chesse-play shows two nattily dressed bearded men at the board and guarantees that readers will learn ‘more by reading of this small Book, than by playing of a thousand Mates. Now augmented in many material things formerly wanting.’

To quote the doyenne of the double meaning Dorothy Parker again: ‘There’s a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.’

Every film, TV series or book can be reduced to a pitch. If you recall, the novelist Elizabeth Buchan memorably called it the ‘backbone’. It forces us to think about what really matters, the kernel of a plot or idea, and the key to this should be opposition. What’s that snap of tension; that point of conflict; that frisson of the unexpected? Which

One of my favourite designs of recent years is Justine Anweiler’s reinterpretation of Peter Benchley’s Jaws. Using minimalist graphics and striking colours, she makes the book’s title intrinsic to the design. The bottom three-quarters of the cover is plain blue, with the blood-red word ‘jaws’ sitting on top of it like a boat in the sea, and the wat

‘There had been many years of his life when he was a tall, good-looking man, no gut, strolling about the campus at Harvard, and people did look at him then, for all those years, he would see students glance at him with deference, and also women, they looked at him.’