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“... Journey. Now, as the succeeding wave reaches the bottom of its downward swing, the BBC send out Bainbridge to follow Priestley, and James Campbell records travels which were in the spirit, if not the footsteps of Muir. Why novelists? Perhaps because it is reckoned that they will give a human dimension to the changes documented in unemployment statistics and ...”

“... Ian McEwan’s The Cement Garden is an instance; more strikingly, the now numerous books of Beryl Bainbridge, who has been shortlisted but has not won. A more recent candidate is Penelope Fitzgerald, whose first straight novel The Bookshop won no prize, and whose second, Offshore, is shortlisted this year. If it wins, I shall need to revise my ...”

“... her general conduct to the whole family strongly savours of that nature.’ Such is the material Bainbridge draws on in composing her story. Some of it she sets forth explicitly; some of it – the odder and more arcane bits especially – she seems (inconsistently) to assume her readers will already be familiar with. Or perhaps she does not assume it. How ...”

“... McMillan in a review of Duffy’s last collection, Mean Time (1993). ‘True. Read. This. Book.’ Beryl Bainbridge provides the key to understanding Duffy’s popularity when she writes that ‘to me, Carol Ann Duffy’s poems are more accessible than most,’ by which she doesn’t mean that there are lots of copies in her local Waterstone’s but ...”

“... utter: ‘The End’ in blood-red Courier to the accompaniment of a firing squad of keystrokes. Beryl Bainbridge, who typed all her first drafts on an Imperial Good Companion (a delicious, steam-punky 1930s machine), went to her grave in 2010, preceded a year earlier by J.G. Ballard, the last writer I’d known personally – besides myself – who ...”

“... Then there were the judgments of critics. She was compared, inevitably, with Barbara Pym and Beryl Bainbridge (the latter she thought ‘a good corrective to vanity’), and was informed by a pundit at a soirée that she had to be in Pym’s ‘group’: ‘You either have to be in hers or Beryl’s. This made me ...”

“... writer she is: ‘Liverpool has had no chronicler in literary fiction’ (she must not be counting Beryl Bainbridge), and more recently, the ‘novels I write tend to defy easy categorisation’. She is fond of tweeting aspects of her novels she says the reviewers have missed. She became ‘really interested in the Israeli story’ between 2003 and ...”

“... with.She spent a few days dipping into novels – Penelope Fitzgerald, Anne Tyler, Carol Shields, Beryl Bainbridge, William Trevor, Tim Parks among others – to limber up. Then she rolled up her sleeves and having extracted the technical nuts and bolts (beginning, middle, end; main and subsidiary plot and characters), wrote Naim Attallah’s novel in ...”

“... of Gaston Dominici. It’s possible at those times to sympathise with the fearlessly out-of-step Beryl Bainbridge, quoted near the end of Talking Proper for demanding that elocution lessons be made compulsory, so that ‘uneducated regional accents’ might be ‘wiped out’. Lynda Mugglestone’s book was first published five years ago, but has been ...”

“... jewel. Apart from a number of prefatory pages by current admirers of Priestley such as Beryl Bainbridge and Margaret Drabble, the chief novelty of this edition is that it has been printed in large coffee-table format to accommodate the numerous photographs that have been interspersed through the text. The addition of these photos, a curious ...”

“... Some of us​ are trapped all our lives. This is the lesson of Beryl Bainbridge’s novel Injury Time, first published in 1977. It is a sort of dinner party farce, except better. The aptly named Edward Freeman asks his friend Simpson and Simpson’s wife, Muriel, to spend the evening with him and his mistress, Binny, at Binny’s house ...”

“... our recent fiction – most remarkably, perhaps, the novels of Peter Ackroyd, D.M. Thomas, Beryl Bainbridge, Julian Barnes and Thomas Keneally, whose Schindler’s Ark was marketed in America (under a slightly different title) as non-fiction and in Britain as a novel. Writers of light fiction, too, have added to the enrichment of their work by ...”

“... and a wealth of handsome faces drawn from the city’s gene-pool. B. is reading his beloved Beryl Bainbridge on the patio. I interrupt him to impart this interesting information. He says: ‘You’re like an open book.’ Next day the woman who cleans wants to know what the procession was like. I say I was disappointed. It was a man on a horse from ...”

“... If Beryl Bainbridge​ had published, as her last novel, a satirical farce about the machinations behind a famous literary prize, she might have managed to weather the accusations of pique. Better yet if she had held it back for posthumous publication, to show that she could wait out her own ego. Anyone else is likely to be seen as settling a score rather than diagnosing the ills of the literary marketplace ...”

“... Spector – but also the Duchess of Windsor, Noël Coward, Peter Stringfellow, Malcolm Sargent, Beryl Bainbridge, John Birt, Jonathan Aitken, Edward Heath et al. This isn’t just a confetti of toe-curling names. Brown catches a moment when discrete segments of society were slowly coalescing into an entity called the Media. A living collage in which ...”