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“... With his three London novels Colin MacInnes hit on a marvellous subject-matter, into which he saw deeply. In other departments, however, he did not have the qualities to match. The books are consequently a frustrating experience – giving the sense of something thwarted, or half-realised. Taken as a group, indeed, they testify to the author’s unease about how best to convey his materials and vision ...”

“... have the membership card for Muriel’s Colony Club in Dean Street, which someone – most likely Colin MacInnes – pressed on me, but alcoholic camp was not my scene, nor jazz theirs, even though at one time they had decent background music played by an agreeable West Indian pianist. I was commissioned almost immediately to write a book. More to the ...”

“... met this clever-naif teenage narrator before, in the novels of J. D. Salinger, Denton Welch and Colin MacInnes. But the device is still successful; and Nicky is, in a surprising way, a prize ...”

“... volumes of Greek myths and Noel Annan’s Leslie Stephen, as well as novels by Thomas Hinde and Colin MacInnes. There was also the peculiar satisfaction of publishing books right outside one’s ken. When we took on Great Horses of the Year, my ignorance of the turf was such that when one of my salesmen suggested that the bookmaker William Hill might ...”

“... Absolute Beginners began as a poetic fantasy about the Fifties, which the ingenious author, Colin MacInnes, had carefully disguised as a documentary about teenagers (few of whom appear in the book): when this rave-from-the-grave was exhumed as a Bowie movie of the Eighties, all the faked-up realism had disappeared. It was total fantasy, but not ...”

“... and her flow of ‘liberating smut’, her job was ‘the constant exercise of social flair’, as Colin MacInnes called it.Within a year or so of the club’s opening, Bacon brought in the crème de la crème of English debauchery. The room swayed. Against the bar, and against most things, you might have found Nina Hamnett next to Louis MacNeice, the ...”

“... interesting parts of the lives of writers often enough take place before they become writers. In Colin MacInnes’s case, one might say that some of the most interesting parts of his life took place before he was born. He was the great-grandchild of the Pre-Raphaelite painter, Edward Burne-Jones, and was thus connected with both the Kipling and the ...”

“... was never quite so cut and dried. Skim the sub rosa lit of the time (Robin Cook, Alexander Baron, Colin MacInnes) and you’re plunged into a lost river with discrete but commingled tributaries: gay, criminal, East End Jewish, upper-class drop-out, lower-class dandy; the ‘morries’ of Cook’s dodgy Chelsea set, and Baron’s Harryboy Boas, a ...”

“... title alludes to Billy Bragg’s ‘Distant Shore’, itself an allusion to a book of essays by Colin MacInnes. Bragg’s asylum seeker has escaped his tormentors (but not the memory of the damage they did) to wash up on ‘a distant shore’. By Phillips’s account, the distant shore is now inland, or anywhere, including the heart of Yorkshire: as ...”

“... about he developed through the succeeding volumes a style marked by dazzling feats of compression. Colin MacInnes’s essay of 1960 on Pevsner’s English is also reprinted in A Celebration. It compares him, not very illuminatingly, with Conrad but does little to characterise him as a writer.At the Architectural Review in the 1930s, James Richards had ...”