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“... also remarks on the novels’ powerful underground influence on the style of modern fiction, on Angus Wilson and probably Kingsley Amis too: and on Lewis’s pioneer use of the grimace, developed in pursuit of his view that men are really machines pretending to be human. T.S. Eliot and Hugh Kenner thought very highly indeed of Monstre Gai and Malign ...”

“... help. But in the 1950s his unsentimental prose was widely admired – especially in Britain. Angus Wilson, Julian Maclaren-Ross and Francis Wyndham all praised him, as did Elizabeth Bowen, who described In Love as a ‘little masterpiece’. One by one his books fell out of print, until the reissue last year of In Love, My Face for the World to See ...”

“... the momentous (insanity) and the everyday offhandedly together. In an anecdotal chapter on Angus Wilson, P.N. Furbank quotes a similar passage from his Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, in which a bossy woman hectors a small boy, ‘so creating a deep psychic trauma that was to cause him to be court-martialled for cowardice many years later in World War ...”

“... emigration to America, and his sense of himself as a writer. Not the kind, as he says of Angus Wilson, who ‘proudly calls your attention to every single God-damned nuance’, but a ‘“reassuring” type of writer’ who ‘takes you by the hand and leads you step by step from a familiar into an unfamiliar situation’. Isherwood knew from ...”

“... attitudes about elite culture, make the top-down instruction provided with such grumpy relish by Wilson problematic. But the chief reason is that the academy won: it was not writers who changed literary criticism, but academic criticism that changed literary criticism. It made it, precisely, more academic. Theory, metalled with its own unforgiving ...”

“... a surreal world of his own contrivance. The literary Britain of Larkin, or early Muriel Spark, or Angus Wilson, has still found no Grosz or Hopper. The landscapes of the new England will go on, it seems, attracting more words than ...”

“... grasp, and took a corresponding relish in the failures of others. She could be unkind: she told Angus Wilson at a vulnerable moment that his publishers had gone bankrupt when they hadn’t. People now tend to assume that the war novels, which Manning began immediately after The Doves of Venus, were immediately and unanimously hailed as ...”

“... heterosexuals’ aren’t in short supply, but for a young gay man there’s only Angus Wilson, plus ill-informed efforts to imagine scenes that, ‘as far as he knew, had never been described at all’. So, in that respect, bring on the iPhones. Paul’s later researches bring the ‘priapic figures in the trees and bushes’ of ...”

“... to end in a cathedral town among public school men’. This is preceded by a quotation from Angus Wilson on Drood which does not really help the discussion, for the point surely is not that the cathedral town and public school are being opposed to urban and industrial England, but that anomalies and mysteries exist in supposedly benign ...”

“... and events move too spasmodically. I would have preferred her memories shaped into fiction by Angus Wilson, or Evelyn Waugh. Joan Wyndham, it would seem, has found no retreat: she has been so busy skimming the waters of the deep, with youngsters on their first adventures, that she has never settled upon one of those harbours where elderly boats are ...”

“... the political map of Strathclyde. Breach of Promise, the title of Clive Ponting’s study of Wilson’s governments of the Sixties, evokes, with its suggestion of sordid betrayal, a polarity which dominates structures of feeling within the Labour Movement. The shades of men like Maclean and Maxton whose failure in politics expressed a refusal to ...”

“... Arms are linked with Jack Trevor Story and Angela Carter; weird genealogies are disclosed. ‘Angus Wilson, the novelist, who bore a striking resemblance to Margaret Rutherford, the actress who originally played Miss Marple’, is present. Also namechecked are Patricia Hodge, Simon Russell Beale, Giles Gordon (once Moorcock’s literary ...”

“... grander Round Room in the British Museum. Presiding over the BM Round Room in his early days was Angus Wilson whereas at the PRO it was Noel Blakiston, friend of Cyril Connolly, hair as white as Wilson’s and possibly the most distinguished-looking man I’ve ever seen. Though I made copious notes on the manuscripts ...”

“... envoy. He obviously enjoyed being made much of and he liked a good junket. A trip to Japan with Angus Wilson was particularly rewarding. At one striptease club, as Wilson recorded, ‘when word went round that we were Spender and Wilson – every single person in the place asked ...”

“... Bathurst’ he says: ‘though the rambling narration has been denounced by both Kingsley Amis and Angus Wilson, the story is as precise as a Swiss watch. Everything fits, but the reader has to wind it up.’ I doubt if the metaphor is well chosen. Such a story is more like a Post-Impressionist painting, for which we have to get our eye in and learn to ...”