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“... homes (though they were his image of paradise). He ‘went native in his own country’, said V.S. Pritchett. He also went native in his own language. But to do either of these things called for extreme self-discipline, for an almost military upper-class rigour. Orwell’s style is of course not the style of tramps. Nor is it the style of cosy tripe shops. In ...”

“... The increasing datedness of the autodidact canon could itself become a handicap: the young V.S. Pritchett (though hardly working class in origin) dreamed of entering literary bohemia in the late 1910s, but ‘all my tastes were conventionally Victorian . . . I seemed irredeemably backward and lower class and the cry of the autodidact and snob broke out in ...”

“... largely on the adroit alternation of exaggeration and understatement which – as V.S. Pritchett put it – “runs like a rheumatism through English humour’”. It is tempting to say: ‘If this is rheumatism, send us more of it.’ Adolescents dreaming of fame used to sit down to analyse how Jerome got his effects, but the apparently easy ...”

“... like Mr Pears had.But the English bourgeoisie is never really as bourgeois as it seems; what V.S. Pritchett called practical madness is always invading. There was some of that at 21 Kirkley Cliff Road, Lowestoft, where Britten was born in 1913. Edith Britten, a pianist and singer of reasonable talent, relentlessly pushed her brilliant youngest son, who was ...”

“... admiration’), Hemingway (‘Turgenev to me is the greatest writer there ever was’) and V.S. Pritchett. But the patchiness with which he is now published and read, and the misconceptions this has generated – that he is predominantly a portraitist of the Russian landscape and the lives of the serfs (as in A Sportsman’s Sketches) or a commentator on ...”

“... other, who read novels in this way, from the inside: Kermode and the all-round man of letters V.S. Pritchett. Kermode was the academic, Pritchett the craftsman, but both thought in long traditions, and both had a writerly interest in the fate of contemporary fiction. In this regard, The Sense of an Ending is Kermode’s ...”

“... diary of his teenage years shows. This journal, judiciously quoted in his memoir Rebecca’s Vest, had some of the self-arraigning qualities of old Presbyterian spiritual diaries and some Romantic young Werther posing, but disciplined by a vigilant sense of irony about his own emotions. Later in his life, he was to defend intelligent self-pity as the ...”

“... in a camp. I come away thinking about the supposed shame stamped on the passport and the grudging visa that had saved her life. The issues all seem so clear and so much more shocking than what now happens every day on the borders of Yugoslavia. Easier to be indignant about, too, with, sixty years ago, the rights and wrongs so unquestionable. Whereas nowadays ...”

“... English comedy, a topic scarcely taxing enough to stretch his capacious critical talents. He sees Pritchett’s petty-bourgeois world as a realm of ‘velvet-lined pubs, cocky salesmen with poor teeth, tired municipal grasses, inflamed women and sherry-fed courage’. Presumably the tired municipal grasses are threadbare bits of public lawn, not weary ...”

“... evoke in recalling a body in a locked library in a country house, hardly go in for artistry. V.S. Pritchett once wrote down the whole genre as philistine, and many are notably badly written, their characters stereotypes and their language a cliché. These particular classics of the Thirties are fictions that evade not only the public horrors they seem faintly ...”

“... are examined in the book’s search for the making of a reputation. Rodden believes that V.S. Pritchett’s obituary in the New Statesman was more important than any other single article in establishing Orwell as an outstanding figure, pointing out that phrases in the article like ‘conscience of his generation’ and terms like ‘Don Quixote’ have ...”

“... An American Tragedy; of Bohumil Hrabal; of Christina Stead; of Henry Green’s Loving; or of V.S. Pritchett’s short stories – Pritchett, who was told by H.G. Wells in the 1930s that the working classes could not be written about without comedy and condescension. All these writers thought Mr Ansell worthy of being ...”