'More, please Dannie' said The Sunday Times on the publication of Journals from the Ant-Heap in 1986. Intermittent Journals answers that call, bringing back into print that book and adding to it ’Notes Mainly from the Clinic’ (1981), unpublished new jottings 1987-1992, and a specially commissioned journal for 1993, Abse’s seventieth birthday year.

Doctors becoming ill, the shortcomings of opera, phoning Larkin from America, the peer with the Harold Wilson pin-up, the etiquette of poetry readings, this is Abse on the human race and, as his grandson corrects him, the egg-and-spoon race of life too. Witty, pointed, tender, gently self-mocking, Intermittent Journals is a stimulating, sometimes argumentative set of contemplations provoking both outright laughter and pause for serious thought.