‘Hanging up on himself the way he always did’. This line, from Paula Morris’s ‘Isn’t It’ , was the first thing that came into my head on waking this morning. The critic Christopher Ricks, I learn from James Wood’s The Nearest Thing to Life (2015), found at the Mary Potter Hospice Op Shop yesterday, ‘once proposed that a fairly good test of literary quality is if a sentence or image or phrase of a writer comes to your mind unbidden when you are, say, just walking down the street’. Morris’s did that for me, as pleasure and as warning.