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“... In the opening chapter of A Study in Scarlet Dr Watson is introduced to Sherlock Holmes. Holmes says, ‘How are you?’ and adds: ‘You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.’ Watson asks in astonishment: ‘How on earth did you know that?’ and Holmes, ‘chuckling to himself’, answers: ‘Never mind.’ In the following chapter the two men observe through a window ‘a stalwart, plainly dressed individual’ walking down the street with a letter in his hand ...”

“... The ‘other worlds’ of the title here given to a gathering of miscellaneous pieces by C.S. Lewis are presumably Malcandra and Perelandra – Mars and Venus as they are revealed to Lewis’s space-traveller, Elwin Ransom – and also perhaps the spiritual world as set against the natural. In the USA, however, the same collection has been published under the title On Stories ...”

“... The dust-jacket of this book reproduces a snapshot of Kipling squatted on the deck of a Union Castle ship while reading or telling a story to a group of absorbed small children clustered around him. In the book itself there is record of a contrasting occasion. On board a P – O ship bound for Egypt, he writes to his daughter Elsie, who is just seventeen, and to his son John, 18 months younger: I haven’t found anybody interesting yet ...”

“... All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ The second part, at least, of Tolstoy’s celebrated dictum is borne out by Angus Wilson’s fiction, which deals largely in families, and this with a rich diversity through a long series of books. Sir Angus shuffles the cards brilliantly, but Unhappy Families remains the name of the pack ...”

“... An inexpert but frequently impressive first novel, Soor Hearts is set in Shetland in the early years of this century. Magnus Doull, having sailed before the mast for ten years, returns to the fishing village from which he had fled under suspicion of having murdered Thomas Pole. Nearly everyone believes him guilty, since the two young men had been seen to quarrel ...”

“... for whom the distance of the past lends enchantment, or at least the appearance of it. With J.I.M. Stewart we are on more familiar English ground, sharing in the jests and gambits of youth and young manhood. The effect is as modest as it is delightful, neither an adjective to be readily applied to Mary McCarthy’s reminiscences. Impossible to imagine her ...”

“... diverse and subtle forms of narrative articulation. Certainly this is what occurs whenever J.I.M. Stewart joyously resumes the hateful harness. Indeed, I doubt whether there are many novelists now writing in English who are his superior in sheer narrative strategy. John Braine’s The Two of Us chugs along episodically until it ends, provisionally, with the ...”

“... the short story from being short.’ ‘A Return to the Glens’ is the strongest story in J.I.M. Stewart’s collection My Aunt Christina. Andrew Pringle, a retired barrister and widower, on a walking tour in Scotland, revisits the scene of an early love affair. He pictures to himself the possibility of a lasting reunion with Elspeth, whom he had abandoned ...”

“... intelligence and originality in its young author. There is nothing remotely Paterian about J.I.M. Stewart’s A Villa in France, despite the fact that the anti-hero is a sexually ambiguous, Oxford-educated aesthete. If a 19th-century paternity exists for this novel, it is surely in the mannered accomplishments of George Meredith, who is credited in passing ...”

“... and illustrations by Nina K. Brisley, are another matter. There’s a very funny story by J.I.M. Stewart in which an elderly connoisseur of boys’ books gets himself suspected of a rather less innocuous addiction. Not that it makes much difference when the truth comes out: in most people’s minds, an adult interest in the trappings of childhood counts as a ...”

“... that surprisingly donnish genre (the English tutor at Christ Church in the 1950s and 1960s, J.I.M. Stewart, wrote detective fiction as Michael Innes, and Edmund Crispin took his pseudonym from one of his novels) could be regarded as Murdoch without the metaphysics. But of course Murdoch without the metaphysics would not quite be Murdoch. Her chief contribution ...”

“... centuries. There is the sceptical curtailing of a proverb: ‘All’s fair in ...’ (J.I.M. Stewart, 1972), ‘Caesar’s wife and that sort of thing’ (Dorothy Sayers, 1930), ‘Faint heart – he mused over the proverb’ (Gissing, 1899), ‘But obedience – We all know the adage’ (Grant, 1847), ‘What is got over his back is spent – you wot ...”

“... inside them. This can localise itself startlingly. A good novelist and literary critic, J.I.M. Stewart, described Leontes as so exact an analysis of civilised anxiety as to verge on a case-study of paranoia. The same edge and depth can attend the most minor players, and often the dingiest among them: Boult, the brothel-servant, who speaks out with all the ...”

“... and Shippey has turned up this, from a campus novel called A Memorial Service by J.I.M. Stewart:‘A sad case,’ [the Regius Professor] concluded unexpectedly.‘Timbermill’s, you mean?’‘Yes, indeed. A notable scholar, it seems. Unchallenged in his field. But he ran off the rails somehow, and produced a long mad book – a kind of apocalyptic ...”