Search Results

“... writer,’ he replies: ‘I write too.’ Then he asks her: ‘Tell me, do you enjoy the novels of ...”

“... ever in Chipping Camden.’ This is all we’re allowed to see. ‘Is this frustrating?’ Julian Barnes asked in his introduction to the 2013 edition. ‘Yes. Is it unfair? A little. Is it calculated? Exactly so.’Fitzgerald’s working papers, held at the Harry Ransom Center in Texas, reveal hints of the future she imagined for Chiara and ...”

“... of his divorce; a parting of ways with his agent Pat Kavanagh and her husband, his great friend, Julian Barnes; the near-death of his mentor Saul Bellow; the discovery that his maternal cousin Lucy Partington, missing since she disappeared without trace in December 1973, had been one of the victims of Fred West. To contemplate this sequence is to see ...”

“... his account of nature is often amusing, or sensitive, it can be astonishingly unsentimental. As Julian Barnes, a long-time Renard enthusiast, writes in his preface to this new selection, translated by Theo Cuffe, ‘there are no Jemima Puddleducks and flopsy bunnies in Renard’s world; or rather bunnies are only flopsy when in the mouth of a gun ...”

“... of the bike sheds, crack out the Rothmans and floor the wits with some incredibly dirty jokes. ‘Julian Barnes has said that novelists don’t write “about” their themes and subjects but “around” them,’ Amis has said, ‘and this is very much my sense of it’: Einstein’s Monsters ‘consisted of five short stories around nuclear weapons and ...”

“... Weaver translates tagliatelle as ‘noodles’, which would hardly be felt necessary today). Julian Barnes, in a tough and very thorough review of Lydia Davis’s translation of Flaubert, summed up the issue: ‘If you want the book in “English”,’ he asks, ‘what sort of English do you choose? Put simply, on the novel’s first page, do you ...”

“... the author Carkin, Lartin, Lackin, Laikin and Lock. I sit in the front row with Blake Morrison, Julian Barnes and Andrew Motion. There are more poems and reminiscences but it’s all a bit thin and jerky. Now Patrick G. arrives, bringing the video of the film he made of Larkin in 1965 but there is further delay because while the machine works there is ...”

“... 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 introducing people ...”

“... young British novelists are and you may well be told Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, William Boyd, Julian Barnes. Given that writers typically have long careers and get better with age, ‘young’ is not entirely a misnomer applied here. Like politicians, novelists can be youthful long after the point at which the careers of athletes or pop-stars are ...”

“... her work, a faint watermark of the Almighty visible if you hold her writings up to the light. Like Julian Barnes in Nothing to Be Frightened of, she did not believe in God, but she missed him, in her case as an amputee misses a limb, the phantom pain accompanying every waking moment, a constant reminder that what should have been there wasn’t. If her ...”

“... Friday lunches Hitchens used to attend, along with people like Amis, Craig Raine, Mark Boxer, Julian Barnes and others. This seems mainly to have consisted of replacing regular words with slightly or much ruder ones: house becomes ‘sock’ (as it does in Amis’s genuinely funny novel Money), man becomes ‘cunt’ or ‘prong’. So you get A Cunt ...”

“... Keneally was also on the shortlist, with Naipaul’s A Bend in the River the clear frontrunner. Julian Barnes remembers Paul Theroux, who was judging, saying he would ‘skim out into the pampas’ the candidates he considered non-starters; back from Patagonia, there he sat at the Booker dinner, ‘a polite smile on his face’. ‘I couldn’t help ...”

“... is that Kalanathi isn’t very good at writing. Having done so little of it, why should he be? As Julian Barnes wrote in his introduction to Daudet’s memoir, dying doesn’t make someone a better writer, or a worse one for that matter. Bad prose, muddled thinking and literary camouflage obscured for me the wisdom that others seem to have found in this ...”

“... Oops. I suspect I’m not the only person to have been caught out, since another contributor was Julian Barnes, who once said that signing a copy of one of his books to Rupert – at the request of Murdoch’s then-wife Anna – was ‘the sentence I am most ashamed of having written’. As Auberon Waugh once said, when a campaign to place a plaque to ...”

“... of the marketplace off against the sophisticated abstraction of ‘cognisance’. Realism,​ Julian Barnes says, is ‘essentially corrective’, and if you ask what Browning’s realism seeks to correct the answer is rather peculiar: it is the idea that the world is same-old-same-old. The beautifully poised way that Browning deploys the very word ...”