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“... parliamentary system. On the way, the essays discuss Edmund Wilson, the Oz books, V.S. Pritchett, Hollywood, Theodore Roosevelt and various other topics and people. Perhaps the best way to get a sense of what Vidal is up to is to look at the title essay. This is a piece in heroic bad taste, full of swash and buckle, and offering a serious argument ...”

“... probably should be destroyed, actually’). The great diagnostician of societies, as V.S. Pritchett described him, seems to have given up on the job – he now just jabs the patient playfully in the liver, or pokes him viciously in the eye. But Magic Seeds is not just a book-length piece of bufferish provocation. Though difficult and often physically ...”

“... only short stories are possible.’ Essentially, this seems an inversion of the argument V.S. Pritchett once made about Russian fiction and the length of the Russian day – that Tolstoyan-scale novels require a bloatedly pampered and settled way of life. Africa doesn’t have time for anything more than literary snapshots and fragments. Charles ...”

“... butcher’s barrow, doing the occasional moonlight flit (regularly experienced by the young V.S. Pritchett) and, to escape the workhouse, relying on the kindness of relatives and neighbours – traditions of give-and-take which still survived in the postwar Bethnal Green anthropologised by Michael Young and Peter Willmott in Family and Kinship in East London ...”

“... Read and Julian Maclaren-Ross each testified that he could manage on £1000 a year net. V.S. Pritchett needed a bit more. Elizabeth Bowen raised a few eyebrows at the time by confessing that ‘I would like to have £3500 a year net’ and Cyril Connolly, who organised Horizon’s survey, opted for ‘five pounds a day’ – £100 a day today: ‘If he ...”

“... grief that a person might feel for the death of a pet after the death of a loved one (V.S. Pritchett wrote about this once). I burst into tears when I told my wife over the telephone, and could not talk further, could scarcely think about it without pain verging on agony, thinking irreplaceable. I had spent more time with this goose than with any other ...”

“... cracking sound’ and the man is turned into ‘a few handfuls of smoking white powder’. V.S. Pritchett wrote: ‘Mr E.M. Forster once spoke of the novelist sending down a bucket into the subconscious; the author of She installed a suction pump.’The trouble with She is that it’s structured around a blank face. We are told that Ayesha had beauty ...”

“... Elizabeth Bowen £3500, while Robert Graves could only suggest ‘living off friends’, and V.S. Pritchett, with sturdy virtue, opined that ‘the failures of overwork are fewer than the failures of idleness.’ Evelyn Waugh, on the whole in kindly mood, reported to Diana Cooper in Paris that Connolly was ‘wholly absurd in his serious moments, which are ...”

“... of the Morning Post. He had already attracted notice with his cynical short stories. V.S. Pritchett has placed him in ‘the early period of the sadistic revival in English comic and satirical writing’. It was a great day for authority-baiting and aunt-bashing, which came to the same thing, and also for finding amusing fates for children – thumbs ...”

“... doing it from the inside, almost as trapped and confused as his characters. Treglown quotes V.S. Pritchett finely describing Green’s special subject as ‘the injury done to certain English minds by the main, conventional emphases of English life’. Hence his New-Novelish expertise in ‘the blurred, the lethargic, inarticulate part of human ...”

“... to dent the image of Gonçalo’s restored vitality. A generation ago, Eça’s admirer V.S. Pritchett saw his later fiction with its dream of aristocracy as preparing the way for Proust. Today, considering its elements of comic realism, romance, satire and magical whimsy, we are bound to think of the 20th-century Latin American novelists. Eça de ...”

“... of The Tin Drum. And, when it’s done properly, it isn’t simplistic or merely exemplary. V.S. Pritchett pointed out that One Hundred Years of Solitude performs its own kind of complex mimesis. Fabulous things happen – two characters fight a four-day eating duel, everyone in the town loses their memory – but the incidents are ‘singular in the way ...”

“... fact – as Jeremy Treglown does very effectively in his biographies of Henry Green and V.S. Pritchett, as Rosemary Hill does in her magical biography of Pugin – but to me a lively new aspect of the form is to be found in the work of those who involve themselves most visibly in their subjects’ dilemmas and who name their own troubles in the narrative ...”

“... and deployment to Normandy. It was a commercial and critical success on publication in 1948; V.S. Pritchett described it as ‘the only war book that has conveyed any sense of reality to me’. Baron later said he wrote it partly because all the novels about the Second World War up to that point had been written by officers, or ‘the kind of intellectuals to ...”

“... Hillary had literally faked the record. Another critic who saw through the peroration was V.S. Pritchett, who wrote in a review of the book: ‘Mr Hillary conveys the impression that he likes the spectacle of himself believing, and not that he believes ... he remains egocentric, busily self-conscious in defiance and remorse.’ A fellow pilot, who was ...”