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“... worth doing well: if a thing can be done well, it must be worth doing. But the more successfully Byatt re-creates the Victorian novel of ideas, the more she persuades us of the irredeemable pastness of the past she re-creates, and the more the ideas she deals with, of determinism, individual freedom, the nature of life after death, seem to announce that ...”

“... as Nicholas Dyer and a 20th-century policeman somehow assuming the discarded name. Ackroyd has also represented historical figures such as Wilde and Chatterton directly, as well as revisiting the name-substitution tactic at least once. Johann Ludwig Heinrich Julius Obermann in The Fall of Troy (2006) is not (Johann Ludwig Heinrich Julius) Schliemann, but ...”

“... remains strong, though some usually avid novel-readers reject it almost with abhorrence – A.S. Byatt, for instance, in whose novels a comparable verbal saturation comes from a close affinity with real Victorian moral tradition. Amis is certainly one of those creators of a fictional world – Evelyn Waugh and Powell himself being other cases – whose ...”

“... contemplated the professionalisation of criticism today and the spread of literary theory. But he also recognised that there was something forlorn about such aggressiveness, which only made the professional men more cocky. Their chief weapon is to present their opponents as unconscious and thus benighted theorists, ‘unselfconsciously sustaining traditional ...”

“... Thirlwell has edited, Multiples, but it involves history as much as literature, and the book is also full of gains, and even fuller of instances where we can’t draw up a balance sheet of any kind, and are driven to quite different modes of comparison. The book reproduces a game played in the pages of McSweeney’s in 2012. Twelve stories are on ...”

“... have claimed that a saga about a young wizard must necessarily be satanically inspired, and A.S. Byatt has implied that if Rowling made a deal with the devil she should have held out for greater imaginative powers. It’s hardly a revelation that War and Peace and Ulysses have more prestige than the Harry Potter books, but no one has ever had as intense a ...”

“... was it not to be found – to follow Tacitus – in richer measure among us barbarians?) They have also wallowed in high-minded nostalgia. For, ever since the Romans (who somewhat ambivalently took over the guardianship of classical Greek culture when they conquered the country), it has been an underlying tenet of most classical scholarship that the present ...”

“... Children; from Abdelfattah Kilito on Hamadhānī through Perry Anderson on Montesquieu and A.S. Byatt on Balzac to Simon Gikandi on Chinua Achebe. Moretti and his contributors have succeeded in making the study of the novel – if not the entire ‘literary field’ – ‘longer, larger and deeper’ than it was before, or than any single scholar could ...”

“... novel in which the coincidence of the mainstream and the canon are taken for granted. D.J. Taylor also confines a his attentions to mainstream fiction (despite a curious weakness for Angela Thirkell), and at first glance he might seem to be following the same track as Bradbury’s later chapters. In fact, After the War is entirely concerned with ...”

“... Some have seen the literary novelist and the university critic in cahoots in this regard. A.S. Byatt complained recently about the absence of memorable characters from contemporary fiction, as if such portraiture had come to be regarded as old-fashioned. The postmodern novelist is too canny to believe in the illusions of human plenitude once peddled by big ...”

“... charms of simple sentences, perfectly polished (‘Alice Munro excites the writer in me,’ A.S. Byatt says, ‘there is something new to learn from her in every sentence’) and perfectly humourless. Reading ten of her collections in a row has induced in me not a glow of admiration but a state of mental torpor that spread into the rest of my life. I became ...”

“... on one of her most beloved authors, D.H. Lawrence. You are reminded of Frederica Potter (or A.S. Byatt herself) reading English at Newnham, trying to figure out what kind of novel you can write afterwards. Among the flowers of the novels, she also published the Amanita phalloides of three memoirs. The first, A Life’s ...”

“... and phenomenological, a matter not so much of people and places as of entities and angles; it’s also one of many suggestions in the novel that correspondences are being drawn between the fictional Serge Carrefax and the historical Sergei Pankeyev, eternally famous for his constipation, his weird compulsions and his sister’s suicide, as written up in ...”

“... expected Penelope Fitzgerald to win the Booker Prize in 1979 for her novel Offshore. Keneally was also on the shortlist, with Naipaul’s A Bend in the River the clear frontrunner. Julian Barnes remembers Paul Theroux, who was judging, saying he would ‘skim out into the pampas’ the candidates he considered non-starters; back from Patagonia, there he sat ...”

“... of pre-publication puff: ‘really marvellous’ (Colin Wilson), ‘wickedly funny’ (A.S. Byatt), ‘very nourishing entertainment’ (Dame Rebecca West). The manuscript’s progress through the hands of less enthusiastic publishers has been recorded in various gossip columns. Anne Smith, editor of the Literary Review, is a canny publicist for herself ...”