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“... Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life is the story of two boys, Toby and Jack. Toby is an ‘A’ grade student, a boy deeply concerned about the world’s esteem, a loyal support to his mother, destined for Princeton like his brother Geoffrey. Jack is a liar and a thief, graceless and violent. Both are versions of Tobias Wolff himself, alternating throughout this exhilarating memoir of his childhood ...”

“... bottom. On the floor of the pool, to his surprise, there was a greenish film, like mould or the mark of a disease. A fingernail whirled it into a tiny mist, dust caught in a shaft of sun. – Breathe, I want the surface, it’s cold. He churned upwards, seeming to grope for invisible hand-holds, and as he broke the surface Eddie splashed him full in the ...”

“... off-balance by some traumatic event might feel persecuted, or that he had been told something. In Mark Illis’s exceptionally promising first novel, A Chinese Summer, a young man tipped into crisis by the unexplained departure of his girlfriend tries in his deep depression to make sense of odd things in the world by interpretative procedures which have ...”

“... fade garrulously on the page, unmysteried and unmissed. Mysterious persons are all the rage in Mark Illis’s The Alchemist, which the publisher’s blurb not untruthfully describes as ‘a subtle and richly-layered tale of a child’s nightmarish quest for truth’. Accepting ‘subtle’ (for which Grumpy might read ‘clever’) and ...”

“... bad and distinctively human, leads to an unpalatable conclusion. To be good at torturing is the mark of a bad person. In other words, to do something distinctively human is to display the mark of a bad person. This is unwelcome news for the naturalist project of trying to elaborate an account of the human good, or the ...”