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“... admittedly very much a minority verdict), to the throwaway Amsterdam, his how-did-that-happen 1998 Booker Prize winner. Sweet Tooth occupies a comfortable middle ground in these terms. His level of craft can be inconsistent, too, with the most ramshackle production to date, Solar, following the most tightly controlled, On Chesil Beach, a book which behaved ...”

“... to sustain the running joke. On the other hand, it’s hard not to be impressed when a twice Booker-nominated novelist chooses to write descriptions of such brilliantly calculated ineptitude as: ‘The sergeant nodded as a thin river of yolk was released from the unsteady Table Mountain of egg. He smiled as he ...”

“... meanness’, or possibly the author doesn’t know what ‘mien’ means. By way of reply, Christopher picks up a brick. When he breaks through the window, Verity sprays him with insecticide. The affair ends. Rebounding from emptiness, Verity takes a job with the Drew Foundation, a body devoted to the enlightenment of underdeveloped countries on health ...”

“... on the lawn, or to me as I sit writing at a table’. The Siege of Krishnapur won the 1973 Booker Prize. The award dinners of those days were not ready for primetime: Rab Butler, drunk, tried to warm up the audience with some anti-semitic jokes (‘A Scotsman, an Irishman and a Jewboy – that sort of thing,’ according to Martyn Goff; Terence ...”

“... Which goes to show that Swift’s style is infectious. If the novel is not a real contender in the Booker stakes I am a Dutch dyke-digger. But the judges will have to like, as I do, sentences like this (describing what happens in a juvenile strip-tease game when doomed Freddie Parr thrusts an eel, ‘a good three-quarter pounder’, inside the sturdy elastic ...”

“... of the shortlist for last year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award for best science fiction novel, Christopher Priest wrote on his blog that part of the award’s purpose is to prove to ‘the larger world’ that science fiction ‘is a progressive, modern literature, with diversity and ambition and ability, and not the pool of generic rehashing that the many ...”

“... beginning and the end of tragic art. And now, with McCarthy’s nomination to this year’s Man Booker longlist, there comes another round of the ancient spectacle. How can the cosy circle open up to absorb him, given how rude he has been about its household gods? ‘The deliberately flattened, almost mechanical characters … make for joyless ...”

“... with its own self-satirising pun). I would add the Nobel Prizes though not, oddly enough, the Booker ones. Nothing that has to be done every year is, however, likely to be much good. (Think of Christmas.) And now, the Oscars themselves are starting to bore people. When the original non-event goes stale, then the society of spectacle is in serious ...”

“... in the breeze’). It might not be enough to rescue the novel from being a noble failure/potential Booker winner, but it’s a reminder of what Lahiri can do when she’s feeling artful rather than ...”

“... circuit, a familiar voice in the literary press. He has stood on both sides of the fence in the Booker stakes, being chairman of the judges in 1981 and a short-listed nominee (for Rates of Exchange) in 1983. He is Professor of American Studies at the University of East Anglia. He is an editorial director of the magazine Granta. Influential, lucid and ...”

“... certain things (death, taxes etc) is the rule that no work of science fiction will ever win the Booker Prize – not even the joke 1890s version. H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine had no chance against ‘literary’ authors like Hardy and Conrad. In the twenty-five years it has been running, no SF title, as I recall, has even been shortlisted for Martyn ...”

“... wordage as Day-Lewis and a lot less than Maugham. From Australia we have Patrick White but not Christopher Brennan or A.D. Hope. Elsewhere one notes the ample presence of D. Lessing and the absence of D. Jacobson; his near-namesake Roman Jakobson is in, and said to be still alive, though alas he is not. Why Auerbach and not Curtius or Spitzer? Why the ...”

“... correspondence generated by her unfavourable review of The Official Foodie Handbook in 1985, Christopher Driver made pointed reference to her ‘perpetually forthcoming’ review of his own work. The postcards that punctuate the book, each one the occasion for an excursion by Clapp into biography or reminiscence, are also sometimes laconic, even for ...”

“... journal. He’s been showered with awards: The English Patient was the winner of the Golden Man Booker, celebrating fifty years of the prize (in his acceptance speech he credited the role Anthony Minghella’s film adaptation may have played in that result). These novels, really, are romances, in the sense that everything that happens in them is charged ...”

“... Freddie. Dee retaliates, having a very public affair with the young, black American designer Hylan Booker, whom she brings to parties in place of her husband, by now ‘Sir Freddie’. Gully remains unruffled: ‘Had she not married my two favourite men in the entire world? So I didn’t doubt for a moment that this improbable but amazing-sounding creature was ...”