"At the Same Time reads like a greatest-hits album - a little politics, something on photography, some lit crit ... but that wicked aphoristic slice, which was always her trademark, is here lost under vague abstractions," said Daniel Swift in the Daily Telegraph, reviewing a collection of essays and speeches by Susan Sontag. "It is hard to escape the feeling that being Susan Sontag - public, spirited, passionate - was her full-time job, and that the writing got pushed to the side." "Intellectually and imaginatively gifted to an extraordinary degree, Sontag used her fearless intelligence to illuminate some of the deepest contradictions of contemporary life," wrote John Gray in the New Statesman. "Who else would note, as she does in her essay 'Regarding the Torture of Others', collected here, the seamless connection between the images of torture coming out of Abu Ghraib and the clichés of the American porn industry? ... In At the Same Time we hear the voice of a unique writer."

Jane Shilling in the Sunday Telegraph felt no "emotional connection" with Paula Hook, the 49-year-old wife and mother whose "wakeful interior monologue" provides the narrative of Graham Swift's Tomorrow. Paul Dunn in the Times thought the problem was Paula's voice. "I found that it grated ... Swift is never uninteresting, never writes poorly, but for once the great ventriloquist has failed to find a true voice." "What grates most about Tomorrow is its voice," agreed Lionel Shriver in the Daily Telegraph, who inexplicably called Paula "Fiona" throughout her review. "Fiona's hesitant, apologetic, alternatingly gushy and beseeching style seems artificially female - like a man's idea of a woman's voice." "In catching Paula's voice, Swift attempts to convey the sense of her own particular dreariness," wrote Sophie Ratcliffe in the New Statesman, who reluctantly concluded: "This is not Swift at his best."

"Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen are, apparently, the first to have the exceedingly good idea of providing a fully edited version of Shakespeare's work as it first appeared in print," said Robert McCrum in the Observer. "We now have a rendering of the Complete Works that, in a rare publishing achievement, would also give complete satisfaction to the author himself." However, John Carey in the Sunday Times had misgivings about using the text of the First Folio: "The logic of this, Bate explains, is that the First Folio was prepared by actors. Unless you think actors are the best editors of Shakespeare, this is not a strong argument." "Bate argues, to me entirely persuasively, that Shakespeare's texts are analogous to the status of screenplays," wrote director Richard Eyre in the Sunday Telegraph, insisting that Shakespeare's plays should be read "not as novels or dramatic poems, but as they were intended: blueprints for performance".