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“... Brooke-Rose, Brigid Brophy, Anthony Burgess, Alan Burns, Angela Carter, Eva Figes, Giles Gordon, Wilson Harris, Rayner Heppenstall, even hasty, muddled Robert Nye, Ann Quin, Penelope Shuttle, Alan Sillitoe (for his last book only. Raw Material indeed), Stefan Themerson, and (coming) John Wheway (stand by): and if only Heathcote Williams would write a ...”

“... Larkin and John Wain knew one another at Oxford, but had little to do with autodidacts like Colin Wilson, John Osborne and Alan Sillitoe – this last name less often mentioned in this context than might have been expected, doubtless because Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) was published a little too late to be fitted into the fashionable ...”

“... to read them. One must acknowledge, however, that Richard Cobb is not Frank Kermode, nor Angus Wilson D.P. Walker. I had come knowing what Britain’s preconceived ideas were: her pragmatism and refusal of abstraction, her solitary traditions and diehard taste for erudition and travail honnête, however ungratifying; knowing, too, that my stock ...”

“... with jewellery. In Madras a beggar girl outside the hotel mimicked the reproving voice of Sir Angus Wilson, a newly departed guest. In Ootacamund (‘Ooty’), where Macaulay began to write his ‘Lays of Ancient Rome’, an old hand began to spill the sort of not-so-plain tales from the hills which would have delighted Evelyn Waugh: there had been a ...”

“... was the greatest English novelist of his generation. Certainly Graham Greene, Henry Green and Angus Wilson thought so, although they and not he won the worldly honours Waugh would dearly have loved. On the other hand, that redoubtable holder of the Order of Merit, J.B. Priestley, did not think so. But then whom would he have ...”

“... poem by Kingsley Amis, Four Quartets, Brideshead Revisited, Nineteen Eighty-Four, William Cooper, Angus Wilson, Horizon, architectural Modernism and the Festival of Britain. Just as you think something important is going to be left out it turns up: the bourgeois intellectual love-affair with France, the nascent aspirations towards internationalism in ...”

“... that of the author. Their disastrous activities, though never criminal, remind one a little of an Angus Wilson family, upper middle-class but going down with all their eccentricities ablaze. The decline in their wealth is quite minutely indicated by Holroyd, who is always careful, when noting their diminishing fortunes, to give us equivalents in modern ...”

“... a crazy actress mother and a useless father, a car salesman manqué – all rather like early Angus Wilson. It is a family call that aborts her affair with a handsome Sorbonne professor, dragging her back to London; her other men are a do-gooder, and an unsuitable husband whose early death leaves her to look after her decrepit father. Ruth has the ...”

“... time he was a genuine odd man out, rather in the sense in which his admirers, Anthony Powell and Angus Wilson, were to be in theirs. At this distance we can see how dependent on a faith most of the ‘black’ novels of the Thirties – whether by comedians like Waugh or gloom merchants like Greene and Mauriac – really were. Both frivolity and despair ...”

“... and its derivatives were timidly admitted into English fiction after the Lady Chatterley trial. Angus Wilson and Iris Murdoch are said to have steeled themselves and forced the f-words into their prose. At first they fairly leaped off the page, but forty-odd years later they have settled in and may occur in almost any work of fiction. In an essay on ...”

“... of her day intimately – by all accounts she was very much a woman of the world, for which see Angus Wilson at his most percipient, in his Preface to her Collected Stories, about her worldy elegance and her clear-eyed attitude to all the aberrations of love – but she no more composed her novels for the interest of their social milieu ...”

“... and introduced herself to Norman Mailer, whose book was being launched. At other parties I saw Angus Wilson, Kingsley Amis, Stephen Spender and others, writers whose work I knew but whose faces (like those of most other writers) did not resemble the photographs on their book jackets. I praised their work, I tried to make an impression, but my talk was ...”

“... of bizarre research himself. There is an embarrassingly well-written account, rather like an early Angus Wilson story, of a terrible Christmas package holiday in a Bournemouth hotel. As ‘Raban’ and a very temporary ‘Mrs Raban’ consort and occasionally cavort with their culturally ‘dispossessed’ fellow guests one feels much as they must have ...”

“... writing’. No one, except Amis’s heroes Nabokov and Bellow, is exempt from censure. Angus Wilson, who gets a bit of a drubbing, was capable of writing ‘the admirable Admiral Croft’ and ‘a revolting revolutionary act’. V.S. Pritchett, for whom Amis has a well-considered and affectionate admiration (expressed with less qualification ...”

“... by many of the novelists he most admires, including the three (Angela Carter, William Golding and Angus Wilson) to whose memory his book is dedicated. The result is a history of the modern 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 ...”