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“... Say ‘Iain Banks’ and the person you are talking to will say ‘The Wasp Factory.’ Banks may have as much trouble getting out from under the success of his first novel as did William Golding. It was a memorable debut. The Wasp Factory provoked a moral panic in 1984. The TLS critic called it the ‘literary equivalent of the nastiest kind of juvenile delinquency’; Margaret Forster thought it less a novel than the script for a video nasty ...”

“... In interviews, Iain Banks has said that his new novel The Steep Approach to Garbadale was first imagined as a fantastical tale of multiple realities, in which characters would find themselves magically trapped inside a board game. The novel he has written instead is a family romance, set in the UK in 2005, and the board game it features is safely non-magical ...”

“... careers website, prospects.ac.uk (a depressing but entirely reliable source, to which I direct my own eager students when they come to me for advice before wisely becoming arts administrators, baristas, or hedge-fund managers), the annual average income for professional writers aged 25-34 from writing alone is ...”

“... Houston compares the fate of the calculator to that of an alien species in the science fiction of Iain M. Banks, which becomes so advanced that it ‘sublimes’ from the physical universe altogether to settle in higher dimensions. The calculator as a gadget may have sublimed into software, but the comparison doesn’t do ...”

“... imagination, and of accidents that proceed from it, is enhanced, however, by comparison with Iain Banks’s treatment of related matters in his new novel. Banks has made a name for himself as an unembarrassable master of the macabre, which he gleefully represented in The Wasp Factory and Walking on ...”

“... Iain Sinclair, in the profane spirit of Surrealism, has chosen to decorate the endpapers of his new work of fiction with a dozen unutterably strange picture-postcards. They show scenes such as that of six men, heavily veiled, veils held down by brimmed hats, posed with long-barrelled rifles. And two men in grass skirts, with feathers in their hair, intent on a game of billiards ...”

“... two street names: the shabby original and the new Tower Hamlets-approved version. New signs, in my experience, mean trouble. Cleanliness comes with a price. ‘Safe’ neighbourhoods and restored iron railings have to be paid for with Kray-style tithes. Ecobabble underwritten with brass knuckles. Tony Lambrianou is a spokesman for this new ...”

“... city overgrown by tropical vegetation,’ Ballard explained, ‘is in some way a fusion of my childhood memories of Shanghai and those of my last ten years in London.’ This synthesis of past and present experiences – ‘of such disparate elements as the modern office buildings of Central London and an alligator ...”

“... If it were​ a race, the first man home – except for Iain Banks who won the trophy by a mile – would be Oliver Sacks (announced 19 February – died 30 August), with Henning Mankell (announced 17 January – died 5 October) a close second. Lisa Jardine won a race of her own, staying shtum publicly, her death a surprise except to the few who knew ...”

“... the capacity of crushing to zero the spirits of fragile, potentially suicidal personalities. Cloud banks absorb the hurt from wounded psyches, become leaden, withhold more of the light. We infect the skies with our own despair. And are infected in return. Unsuspected weather-allergies roam the city like serial-killers. Bad will generates a sympathetic storm. A ...”

“... representing a portion of the Lower Lea Valley, shrouded in surrounding folds of grey, reminds me of the Hoo Peninsula, a secretive landscape at the mouth of the Thames Estuary. I should be out there now. I have been brooding on Peter Ackroyd’s notion that the Thames is a river like the Ganges or the Jordan, a place of pilgrimage, a source of spiritual ...”

“... houses and exotic contrasts which has survived the levelling embrace of the welfare state. I made my first encounter with the contemporary perspectives of the place a few years ago when visiting Christ Church to attend a concert in the Spitalfields Festival. Just getting into the building proved interesting enough, not least because the approaching ...”

“... like the clammy interrogation of Soho, reconsidered urgency, loss of nerve. The printed card in my pocket depicts a stack of scarlet container units, a pylon, a purple sky. An invitation to an invisible art manifestation: Lost Memories by Emma Matthews. ‘Very elegant, very Paul Klee,’ the punters say. Rusting English metal, from somewhere down the ...”

“... bowl in the Ochil hills, and is orientated almost exactly east-west. On its north and south banks grow sparse hawthorns tufted with lichen and old stunted oaks. At its western end, where the springs that feed the loch rise, Scots pines and larches dominate. On winter afternoons they stand silhouetted against the sunset. Because the loch was dammed to ...”

“... with pairs of butlers, cooks, cleaners, sailors and security operatives.Knowles’s book acted on me like a goad, a stone in the shoe. I had the notion that somewhere behind and beyond the sharp-eyed sociological expeditions she undertakes was a General Theory of Everything. A resolution of that terrible inundation coming from all sides at once: our ultimate ...”