In John Updike's second collection of assorted prose he comes into his own as a book reviewer; most of the pieces picked up here were first published in The New Yorker in the 1960s and early '70s. If one word could sum up the young...

What Martin Amis has described as Updike's 'cat's-cradle of vigorous adultery' is new to "Modern Classics". von Updike, John

To Carter Billings, the hero of John Updike's title story, all of England has the glow of an afterlife: "A miraculous lacquer lay upon everything, beading each roadside twig, each reed of thatch in the cottage roofs, each tiny daisy...