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* In ‘Memoir’, David Constantine writes movingly about his father’s depression and his uncertain utterances:

Before he died I often felt I should want to speak for him; now it would be truer to say I want to reassure him… I used to want to hide my eyes in love and pity from the spectacle of such an openness to wounding… Here was a man trying something out, often nothing very much, with all the confidence he could muster; often not much. Therein their force to trouble and move me lay.

* Richard Gwyn provides a bewildering vivid account of his experience of hepatic encephalopathy, or as he calls it ‘brain fog’, describing the puzzlement of being at the centre of a neurological disease, inwardly stuck and aware of losses that awareness cannot restore.

* Poet on His Work: Michael Schmidt (author of the brilliantly useful Lives of the English Poets and editor of PN Review) writes on his poem, ‘Also, Poor Yorick’.

* New poetry by Neil Curry, Patrick McGuinness, Alison Brackenbury and Julie-ann Rowell.

* Hanif Kureishi writes on the relationship of the teacher of creative writing to the students in their struggle to realise their subject matter.

* David Almond (author of Skellig and the 2009 Liverpool Reads book The Savage) talks to Jane Davis about his schooldays and his relationship to books, writing and religion.