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“... of diverting the tedium of a ship at anchor’, four passengers, among them a young man called Munro, went ashore to hunt deer on Saugor Island. Another member of the party, Captain Henry Conran, described what followed in a letter to a friend: About half past three we sat down on the edge of the jungle, to eat some cold meat sent us from the ship, and had ...”

“... Queenie said,​ ‘Maybe you better stop calling me that,’ and I said, ‘What?’ ‘Stan doesn’t like it,’ she said. ‘Queenie.’ It was a worse surprise to me to hear her say ‘Stan’ than to have her tell me to call her by her right name, which was Lena. But I could hardly expect her to go on calling him Mr Vorguilla, now that they were married, and had been for nearly two years ...”

“... Alice Munro doesn’t write much about her writing: there are only a few interviews, hardly any essays or journalistic pieces, and we don’t catch her holding forth about her literary likes and dislikes. But here in her new collection, The View from Castle Rock, she speaks to us directly, first in a brief introduction explaining the way the book has been put together, and then in a piece, ‘No Advantages’, in which she describes in her own person the researches into her family history that have resulted in some of the stories that follow ...”

“... It was love she sickened at,’ Alice Munro wrote in The Beggar Maid. ‘It was the enslavement, the self-abasement, the self-deception.’ If that’s her attitude it doesn’t promise much romance for her latest collection, despite its title; and in fact the book describes not so much love as the subtle changes in loyalty and disposition of which sexual love is only one (and not the most important) example ...”

“... rural sameness. At one intersection is the tiny town of Wingham (population c.2952), where Alice Munro was born in 1931, and twenty miles to the south, another tiny town: Clinton (population c.3240), where Munro has lived for the past thirty years with her second husband. Munro seems ...”

“... The Canadian writer Alice Munro once likened a good short story to a commodious house whose every room possesses an exterior door. So accommodating a house, she wrote, is capable of admitting visitors through any number of openings, just as a story can be entered by way of its separate sections or paragraphs or even its individual sentences or words ...”

“... them. In this category are Tolstoy, Chekhov; and in our age the late V.S. Pritchett and Alice Munro. Alice Munro is such a good writer that nobody bothers anymore to judge her goodness, as people long ago stopped judging Pritchett’s – her reputation is like a good address. She is surely Pritchett’s great rival at ...”

“... There’s something confusing about the consensus around Alice Munro. It has to do with the way her critics begin by asserting her goodness, her greatness, her majorness or her bestness, and then quickly adopt a defensive tone, instructing us in ways of seeing as virtues the many things about her writing that might be considered shortcomings ...”

“... the possible perils of such hyperbole ... but I digress. Having now read rather more of Munro’s fictions, I am in a position to reveal to a breathlessly anticipatory world that the down-to-earth social realism of the Studge saga is present throughout the oeuvre. This is not, by and large, the quality for which Saki has been most praised, but it ...”

“... with the assistance of the consulate’s naval and military attachés, Jack Fyfe-Miller and Alwyn Munro. The slow beginning can be put down to Boyd’s needing time to set up various devices that will go off on cue as the plot unfolds. He has a lot of work to do. Like most thriller writers, he wants to use the form to explore moral ugliness, just as he uses ...”

“... without, in fact, displaying the rather tired characteristics of womanliness, is provided by Alice Munro in The Moons of Jupiter. In this excellent collection of stories, Alice Munro is treading on the heels of her compatriot, Margaret Atwood. Events are less powerful in Munro’s ...”

“... interesting to men who want to know what women think of them and know about them. Alice Munro is a 56-year-old Canadian who has been married twice: she is particularly concerned with the knowingness derived from broken relationships. One of the 11 skilful stories in this book (her sixth collection) is called ‘Lichen’ – a fungoid growth or ...”

“... and lending a fond ear to the drone, he may have parley with old folks of old affairs. Neil Munro, ‘The Lost Pibroch’ We were talking about the hills when the land fell silent. By that time, the deer were cartoons, soft focus in the rear-view mirror, the hare in our headlamps brotherly to nothing but the rain. Before I came in, I stood in ...”

“... that she’d known their behaviour was ‘improper’ and had wanted to leave the school. Janet Munro, who shared a bed with Miss Woods, had more to say, claiming that Miss Pirie had often climbed into their bed, and that high breathing and tossing of the bedclothes had followed; she said she had once coughed to alert the teachers, and once nudged a friend ...”