Friends for life

Great Literary Friendships

Janet Phillips (Bodleian, £16.99)

I DON’T accept the old adage ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’. I buy books I already own when I see a new edition with a wonderful cover. Then there is the title. Imagine our debt of gratitude to Ezra Pound, who edited a young poet and made him dump ‘He Do the Police in Different Voices’ and instead call his long poem The Waste Land. Bless Maxwell Perkins who rejected ‘Under the Red, White and Blue’ and insisted on The Great Gatsby. Which gets me to the book at hand.

I fell for it immediately. Not for the cover (more decorative than bookish), but because I already have two volumes on the subject, , in which writers describe the personal and intellectual relationships they’ve had with fellow writers and artists—Seamus Heaney on Thomas Flanagan, Joseph