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“... John Murray’s fiction has always seemed to arise directly from the circumstances of his own life. At first, his work concentrated on his childhood and adolescence among the tiny, depressed communities that straggle along the English side of the Solway Firth. He then broke with his working-class background and read Sanskrit and Avestan at Oxford, later studying classical Indian medicine ...”

“... That year we had the worst winter I had known. It had taken two men with picks to break the ground in the churchyard, and when the soil was lifted it was in great jagged lumps as heavy as stone. All this was a long time ago. I travelled by horse, although I had once sat in a car owned by my bishop. The villagers told me they never dreamed of owning cars ...”

“... We both know the reasons.’ The mist was thick outside, turning trees in the park to ghosts, making the city noises hollow, condensing where it touched telephone wires, pavements, glass. It was, Savage speculated, like rain-forest mist. His imagination lifted him out of the room and its enclosed painful scene and into vistas of cloud rolling through cable-thick greenery where strange birds called ...”

“... We’re certain it must be his,’ the phone call had said. The day was hot. You could see the excavator from a mile away as it crouched on the flatland, a giant locust of yellow metal. We drove at an angle to it along a road as flat and exposed as a causeway until Nick swung the Land Rover off the road and headed it towards the dig. Picks and spades clashed and shuddered in the back and Sally bounced on the seat beside me ...”

“... and its ways, seem simply to have been found, not made. And how simply. These are arts which Christopher Burns has yet to master. There are others, however, of which he already has an impressive command. Snakewrist, a first novel of unusual promise, is far too concerned with getting across a message to sustain over its full length the illusion of ...”

“... the connections which the novel makes between the personal and the political are more explicit. Christopher Burns’s third novel is narrated by Ernest Tinnion, a former mountain climber who has returned, fifty years on, to the site of his greatest triumph-and-disaster, the Versücherin (‘Temptress’) mountain in Switzerland. The bulk of the novel ...”

“... In the current novel, there’s a sharp, unkind analysis of the contemporary English novelist Christopher Burns (‘shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year 1989’): We discussed the way in which the labour of unsuccessful writers, artists and musicians valorises the bestselling efforts of those who succeed. ...”

“... to problems of figure and ground: how to combine the domestic scale with the broad view. Even Christopher Burns’s The Flint Bed, which looks to be going to find its subject in English provincial life, expands (via a plot tied to a photograph from 1975 of desperate refugees fighting to get onto a helicopter lifting off from the American Embassy in ...”

“... put it, sallied forth for some amber fluid. Turning to a couple of leaner collections is a relief. Christopher Burns’s 14 pieces demonstrate a very assured, inventive, hard-edged, rather cold talent, playing some Post Modernist tricks (‘How things are put together’, ‘Dealing in Fictions’, both of which smell a little of the creative-writing ...”

“... to Ardoyne, the Catholic, Irish nationalist district that’s also the main setting of Anna Burns’s first novel, No Bones (2001). That novel, in which the characters have names like Roberta and Fergal and Bernadette and Vincent, centres on Amelia Lovett, who is a small girl when the Troubles start in 1969 and can’t believe that they’re still going ...”

“... philosopher Thomas Blackwell was writing that Homer was a ‘stroling indigent Bard’. Robert Burns liked that idea. In ‘Love and Liberty’ a bard sings alongside prostitutes and tinkers, and pronounces himself ‘Homer like’. Burns’s footnote (Burns enjoyed footnotes) points ...”

“... marijuana remained.’ This has its affinities not only with the world of a Chandler (which Mailer burns at both ends), but also with Romantic Gothic. The inhumed human head, the herb: Isabella, or the Pot of Pot. Some Keatsian byplay is kept up by the heroine’s being called Madeleine (almost right); and Madeleine Falco is an Italian not a Maltese ...”

“... and risible: but the anecdote is as memorable as that of the young Walter Scott meeting Robert Burns in the house of Adam Ferguson. Edinburgh from the 1770s to the 1790s was Boswell’s to a far greater extent than Royle admits. Kames and Hume were already dead by 1787 when Burns appeared in Edinburgh under the ...”

“... Before 1922 Hugh MacDiarmid did not exist. And only Christopher Murray Grieve would have dared to invent him. Alan Bold’s valuable biography points out that when the 30-year-old Grieve began to write in the Scottish Chapbook under the pseudonym ‘M’Diarmid’, he was already editing the magazine under his own name, reviewing for it as ‘Martin Gillespie’, and employing himself as its Advertising Manager (and occasional contributor), ‘A ...”

“... sheugh’, and reports that it is ‘recorded all over Scotland from Aberdeen to Galloway – Burns uses it – and in England from Northumberland to Chester’. But readers can’t be expected to know that ‘prod’ means Protestant or that ‘the Cruiser’ is Conor Cruise O’Brien. Gourly is gurly or rough, a corrie is a mountain-hollow, a spooly is ...”