At one time, alongside their regular ‘state of the art’ reassessments, the major publishing houses would produce big popular, themed anthologies, invariably edited by a man, and in most cases by Geoffrey Grigson. They still exist to a certain extent – war poetry, love poetry, nature poetry – but tend to be in aid of some topical concern or emerge from literary micro-breweries such as Candlestick Press (with their Ten Poems ‘instead of a card’ series). Appropriately enough, D.J. Enright’s first themed anthology, The Faber Book of Death came out the year Grigson died (he was one of the contributors, and also reviewed it) and the pattern was quickly set. Enright was hardly a young man in 1985, but he was well placed to continue the anthology tradition, having worked in publishing since the early 1970s and possessing the necessary magpie instinct. The Book of Death was followed by Ill at Ease: Writers on Ailments, Real and Imagined (1989), which was reissued the same year (rather puzzlingly, and in the same gruesome red jacket) under the title The Faber Book of Fevers and Frets. The themes brightened a little for The Oxford Book of Friendship (1991, with David Rawlinson) and finally came the enormous Oxford Book of the Supernatural (1994).

Enright’s curatorial gifts had been demonstrated almost forty years earlier when he brought out Poets of the 1950s: An Anthology of English Verse (somehow managing to edit it while living in Japan) and confirmed in their full maturity by The Oxford Book of Contemporary ...