Search Results

“... relation to the hoary chestnuts ‘Art v. Life’ and ‘Intellect v. Instinct’ is suggested. Oliver Pritchett’s A Prize Paradise, another first novel, is altogether more modest and familiar: a modishly spare and astringent satiric farce, in the manners of Waugh and Amis. Its hero of sorts, Christopher Sharp, works for Overseas Citrus, on the West ...”

“... ritual before them. Charles gave his spluttering laugh. And it was so boring and pointless.’ And Oliver Pritchett tells Alexander Chancellor a middling good yarn (‘Perry’ is Peregrine Worsthorne): He said he’d just seen the most sinister man he’d ever clapped eyes on moving towards Perry’s office and was terribly afraid that the man’s ...”

“... whose outcomes we find satisfying. For the greater part of his very long adult life, Victor Sawdon Pritchett seems to have been a happy man. Pritchett’s son, Oliver, later recalled that he and his sister grew up ‘in a word factory’. ‘The handwritten pages, covered in ...”

“... youthful achievement: by thirty, Dickens had produced Sketches by Boz, The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge; Prince had danced his high heels from For You to Lovesexy via Dirty Mind, 1999, Purple Rain and Sign o’ the Times. But there is Wikipedia for this sort of thing, as there is for so much ...”

“... The increasing datedness of the autodidact canon could itself become a handicap: the young V.S. Pritchett (though hardly working class in origin) dreamed of entering literary bohemia in the late 1910s, but ‘all my tastes were conventionally Victorian . . . I seemed irredeemably backward and lower class and the cry of the autodidact and snob broke out in ...”

“... his near contemporaries in Britain, it is tempting to try to see Wilson as a blend of Orwell, Pritchett and Isaiah Berlin (also writers around whom a fair bit of nostalgic commentary has clustered). But even that alluring amalgam doesn’t altogether catch him, and one element it doesn’t represent is the impression he gave even from quite early on of ...”