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“... I was friendly with Jeanette Winterson in the 1980s – we even went away for a weekend together. I went slightly cool on the friendship, though she didn’t exactly do anything wrong. We ran into each other occasionally after the publication of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, and we once read to an audience of nine in Burnley (I doubt if even one of the nine was there to hear me ...”

“... Each new book by Jeanette Winterson is said to be poorer than its predecessor; she is like a bibliographer’s definition of nostalgia. As her novels become more ghostly, so they give off a stronger vapour of self-promotion. Her last, Written On The Body, announced on its cover that it had ‘fused mathematical exactness and poetic intensity and made language new ...”

“... personalities with new emotional understandings. If this happens to the writer, she is lost.’ Jeanette Winterson, ‘A Work of My Own’,Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery (1995) From the outside, Jeanette Winterson’s new book looks quite different from what she usually does. Instead of one of ...”

“... and bad temper, and cut their men down to human size. Women’s erotica differs from men’s, Jeanette Winterson argues, by seeking ‘to return women to their bodies by offering a looking-glass and not a distorting mirror’; men ‘picture the whole world as a giant reflection of their prick’, whereas ‘in fact, the world is round. In fact, it ...”

“... tensions within the Marx family. But she has kind words for Holmes’s ‘ebullient prose’. Jeanette Winterson calls the book ‘brilliant’ in the Telegraph; Rosemary Ashton in the Literary Review points up its ‘brio’; Lisa Jardine in the Financial Times says Holmes’s ‘fresh and vital style’ renders Eleanor ‘unforgettable’. None of ...”

“... of Scottish fiction; James Kelman’s name, for example, doesn’t come up. And what about women? Jeanette Winterson, not exactly unfamous, isn’t featured; nor is Hilary Mantel; though Zadie Smith inevitably is. Most published works of fiction are not particularly good, as has surely always been the case (and the situation must seem worse now, whenever ...”

“... After stealing a talking parrot on the island of Capri, Jeanette Winterson’s latest narrator is referred to the Tavistock Clinic, where she explains that she was trying to capture some sort of meaning. The therapist innocently suggests she write a story, ‘with a beginning, a middle and an end’, to get back in touch with reality ...”

“... Anita Brookner has not given up the notion that we might manage to live happily ever after. Jeanette Winterson’s relations with fantasy are less wary than anything to be found in Brookner’s temperate reflections. Founded on the political creeds of ecology and feminism, Sexing the cherry fuses male and female voices in an exuberant blend of the ...”

“... body stocking and a coronet of artificial crocuses, strongly suggests womanhood. So does Winterson’s general avoidance of male characters. Whoever or whatever she is, she concedes nothing to conventional femininity. In one of her lighter moments she brags about former conquests with a bravado reminiscent of Bill Naughton’s Cockney ...”

“... meet on Lesbos, ‘in another life’, but ‘Meanwhile there’s a stink of fat and baby crap.’ Jeanette Winterson’s response to Sappho is even angrier. In Art and Lies, her Sappho cries in outraged capital letters: ‘WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH MY POEMS?’ In fact, the proportion of lost work is no higher for Sappho than for many other ancient ...”

“... or at least the version of those qualities represented by (say) a Violet Trefusis or a Jeanette Winterson, two Castle favourites. Common sense only gets you so far. It’s not always such fun playing along, however. The title-essay is more sentimental than pointed, and the ghostly presences she detects in work by writers ranging from Defoe and ...”

“... places are frequented by other contemporary novelists like Margaret Forster, Hilary Mantel and Jeanette Winterson; two of them black humorists like Bainbridge, but none quite as funny, and certainly not as unexpected and disturbing. She is a cross between a witch and a clown. Clowns unleash chaos, and that is what she does. Unlike Morgan, she believes ...”

“... because one of the books whose absence was most complained of was Ali Smith’s There but for the. Jeanette Winterson said that Smith’s novel, about a dinner-party guest who hides in his hosts’ spare bedroom and refuses to come out, was a ‘wonderful, word-playful’ book left out because it didn’t fit the judges’ philistine criteria. There but ...”

“... of comedies or tragicomedies rather than tragedies. It’s hard to read without some pain either Jeanette Winterson’s rewriting of The Winter’s Tale or Howard Jacobson’s of The Merchant of Venice. Part of the problem is that this series seems to operate on the principle that the ideal person to rewrite a given play must be one who shares an ...”

“... is what passes for Wildean wit at the MLA); ‘Teledildonics: Virtual Lesbians in the Fiction of Jeanette Winterson’; or the terser, but sublimely opaque ‘Autophagy and the Logic of the Absolute Fragment’. These titles will have been solemnly approved by an MLA committee. The same committee has also given its stamp of approval to a quantity of ...”