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“... novelist. As judicious (though not hopelessly balanced) accounts, the new biographies by Gordon Bowker and D.J. Taylor confirm what the law of averages might have led one to suspect: some of this is true, some of it questionable and the rest of it false. (Scott Lucas, by contrast, thinks almost all of it true.) Orwell was indeed ...”

“... the model for ‘Mr Chips’ (I don’t know what that means in practical terms, but both Day and Bowker tell you so). A teacher remembers Lowry as ‘a rather shaggy, laconic boy, “a cat that walked by itself”’. His style was already emerging. To thank his mother for some cushions, he wrote: ‘The study now resembles the bibliothèque of an Armenian ...”

“... conflicting needs and what part did the consequent tension play in his achievement as a writer? Gordon Bowker never frames these questions or discusses his intentions as a literary biographer. His account proceeds in linear fashion, most chapters covering a period of one or two years. Detail overwhelms reflection throughout, while the connection ...”

“... the manuscript of the novel. This communication has rightly been described by Lowry’s biographer Gordon Bowker as ‘probably the most subtle and revealing letter ever written by an English author about his work’. Tracing the last day in the life of Geoffrey Firmin, the dipsomaniac British consul in Mexico, as he grapples with and succumbs to his ...”

“... the British Communist David Crook who did most of the spying on the Orwells – and, according to Gordon Bowker in his biography of Orwell, Crook went on to suggest that Eileen was having an affair with Kopp. The snakepit from which the Orrs scrambled when they left for France was deep and dangerous. Like many of their kind, they never quite put it ...”