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“... to be the endowment of ‘the late Dr D.M. McDonald, a well-known and successful industrialist’. Louis deBernières, presumably the Louis deBernières who wrote Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, has written an indignant letter to the ...”

“... elders smoke in ‘exemplary and companionable silence’. At this point, it’s clear that Louis deBernières is back in business, preparing to depict a few ‘incandescent and illicit moments’ of tenderness among the ‘banal but vile atrocities’ of history’s ‘prolonged and atrocious holocaust’. This ...”

“... Who would have expected Louis deBernières to follow up Captain Corelli’s Mandolin with the soft-centred biography of a lovable pooch? Red Dog could be seen as a reversion to national type – the English, Nabokov witheringly remarked, feel sorry for the blind man’s dog ...”

“... Anne Stevenson, Alan Brownjohn, Helen Simpson, Andrew Motion, Michael Hofmann, Alan Sillitoe, Louis deBernières and Geoff Dyer are ten of them, and ‘new’ isn’t the first word that springs to mind. But there are plenty of good reasons, too obvious to need repeating, for the inclusion of well-known ...”

“... on that worthy series. He is revealed as the most treasonable of clerks, a compound of Waldheim, de Man, Harry Lime and Lukacs. Thematically, Doctor Criminale shapes up as a kind of post-Maastricht version of Henry James’s international theme: English ingenuousness discovers corruption beneath the seductive surfaces of European civilisation. For all his ...”

“... a genre which is currently enjoying a little golden age. Air and Fire, like recent novels by Louis deBernières and Nicholas Shakespeare, conveys a powerful sense of faraway places. As with de Bernières and Shakespeare, Thomson’s traveller’s tale gravitates to the ...”

“... see the tedious fables of Jeanette Winterson, or the eccentric but warm-hearted villagers of Louis deBernières. These days, magic realism is deservedly out of fashion. But it’s worth remembering that it has been one of the great styles of the last fifty years. When executed with intelligence, subtlety and ...”