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“... It’s probably an accident that his most purely satirical novel, What a Carve Up!, is also his best. Even there, the satire is really beside the point. The book deals with the several members of a superlatively dislikeable clan, the Winshaws, and it’s a toss-up as to which son or daughter of the manse is the most entertainingly despicable. A decade ...”

“... was ‘no sensualist. He might have made a mechanical engineer.’ Monogamy didn’t suit women best: ‘I can well believe men were masochistic enough to impose monogamy on themselves as a hair shirt, but I find it a touch implausible that the hair shirt designed for the husband just happened to be a comfortable and perfectly fitting garment for the ...”

“... were about, but because they were written by him. The Sense of an Ending was (and is) one of the best books I had ever read; and even though he was formidably learned there was no sense of his own superiority in his writing. He had a fluency and a subtlety and a grasp that was unique. It had been impressed on us at school that literary criticism was not ...”