Cirrus@Austlit

'I have never been one to refuse a literary lunch. ‘A man’s got to eat,’ as Brian Kiernan puts it. Though when I was publishing Brian’s Studies in Australian Literary History he did complain that I was the most interventionist editor he had ever known, less for my editorial suggestions, of which there were few, but for my habit of calling him up and suggesting lunch. Not that he ever seemed to refuse lunch in my recollection, but it did delay the book a bit. Many a meal we have shared with visiting celebrities and literary editors fast approaching their use-by date. The wit, the repartee, the exchange of insights and the capping of each other’s quotations, the progressively heated discussions leading to confrontation, misunderstanding, and recrimination.' (Introduction)