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“... There is nothing enigmatic about Stephen Vizinczey. He has views, he shouts, cajoles, threatens and sneers. He worships Kleist and Stendhal, loathes William Styron and Sainte-Beuve, is conspicuously silent about Flaubert and seems to have a love-hate relationship with Nabokov. He delights in summoning up his rhetoric of loathing for the Nazis and the Mafia and in distilling hard, frequently paradoxical conclusions from his insights ...”

“... and very alien; that strangeness can only be perceived through the medium of the present.’ Thus Bryan Appleyard, conscious of the difficulty of his project, which is to sketch the history of British art in the post-war years. The sentence occurs in an apologetic introduction, and it indicates some of the difficulties inherent in the author’s approach ...”

“... there are others in the works. The backlash has been with us for some time in the written word. Bryan Appleyard intends to take full advantage of that. He has scorn for even the greatest popularisers in the Bronowski tradition, men such as Carl Sagan. He tells a story of some of the sciences from the time of Galileo to the present. Coming soon: the ...”

“... in gents’ suiting would scandalise the trading floor – a point brought home by a caption in Bryan Appleyard’s biography: Rogers about to leave Belsize Grove for the first Lloyd’s interview in the Yves St Laurent suit’. It was grey, bought specially for the occasion, and worn with a borrowed tie. ...”

“... ineluctable limitations: ‘art promises everything and changes nothing.’ The words belong to Bryan Appleyard, celebrating Lolita’s 40th birthday in 1995. ‘Humbert,’ he wrote, ‘is caged by his own genius ... And there is no outside.’ However, seeing Nabokov in Adair’s mirror, and contemplating the elaborate play with powerlessness this ...”

“... vocabulary of expression, and who ... has re-educated the sensibility of an entire generation’. Bryan Appleyard in The Pleasures of Peace calls Prynne ‘the most comprehensively gifted of living British poets’. The books will continue to dazzle without the slogan exchanges which represent the plea-bargaining of critical debate. Prynne’s ...”