“He literally brought the house down,” says Paul Crossley on Radio 3. “Yes,” says Michael Berkeley. “It was very exciting the way he set the hall alight.”

Maybe the sporting challenge of competitive piano playing exempts commentators from listening to what they’re saying. Essayists can’t afford that indulgence. Ruth Holland listens to every word that she uses and, as a result, she doesn’t write at us but talks to us. Here’s how she started a book review for this journal:

“In time back way back, as they say in Riddley Walker (a work of imaginative genius, mention of which can only raise the tone around here), life was a lot simpler. One was born, grew up, fed, slept, reproduced, and died—no messing. We’ve worked on that, though, yessir. Nowadays you might not even have entered the womb by the traditional route, and leaving it isn’t a private matter between you and your mother but a nine months’ run of a large cast, all-star, amazing Technicolor medical extravaganza, complete with special effects.”

The scattered fragments of the Holland oeuvre have now been gathered into a book that I suspect will stay by my bedside till the end of my natural because Ruth, until her tragic death in 1996, was very much a writer’s writer—is a writer’s writer for, as she explains, “in literature, time and distance mean nothing; you can meet the dead just as happily as the living, and they will take you into their confidence, tell you their jokes, give you the benefit of their opinions and experience, and ask for nothing in return but your eye on the book.”

Wit and Fizz offers us the chance to stroll the byways of medicine with a beguiling guide who is not just impish—a reading of her pastiche of the Pooter style of medical autobiography provoked those attending her memorial gathering to raucous mirth—but records her observations in an interesting way. “Nothing brings on the yawns more quickly than earnest self-revelation.... Most people’s souls, like their bodies, are best kept decently covered.”

Words left to speak for themselves can sometimes work surrealistic magic—an ambulance driver once told me, “I’d give my right arm to be able to play the guitar”—but the true sorcerers are writers like Ruth who have an ear for the rhythm of language and know the value of every word that they choose. This collection is a splendid memorial to someone well worth remembering.