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“... For forty years, in person and in writing, Raymond Mortimer was an ornament of English literary journalism. He was at his best, I think, in the querulous Thirties and Forties when he was Literary Editor of the New Statesman. In the preface to his only book, a collection of essays with the typically Edwardian title of Channel Packet, he described himself ‘without humility’ as a journalist and not an author ...”

“... Early in 1923, when I was a very naive and untrained newspaper correspondent in Dublin, it was my duty to take a regular trip to Belfast and to find out what was going on politically in that depressing and bigoted city of linen mills and shipyards. The Orangemen were contemptuous of the Southern Irish and had a blustering condescension to Englishmen like myself, and one of the few people whose talk was a relief from this was Forrest Reid, a novelist and critic in his late forties, admired by Yeats, Forster and Walter de la Mare, but almost ignored in his own city at that time ...”

“... A way into secrecy frisked a pampered mouse’ – a curdled Georgian sentence that leads one straight into one of Walter de la Mare’s most plain and chilling tales about a boy’s initiation into horror. The story is ‘An Ideal Craftsman’. In this genre he was a master – albeit a very literary master – of the riddles of sado-masochism, the dark underside of his ‘magic ...”

“... One of the pleasures of reading Peacock in the Thirties, when I first read him, was that he was without acrimony. He enabled us to relive the great battles of ideas in the 19th century without an aching head. His conversation was spirited and diverting and he had sceptical hopes of human nature. Born in 1785 and dying in 1866, Peacock lived through 80 years of rancorous social change ...”

“... That has an ominous sound. None of these suggestions seems to fit the way in which V.S. Pritchett wrote his novels and stories. Many are absolute masterpieces, no doubt about that: but the master who wrote them did not think his own process deserved any extended comment. Never had a great craftsman, and one who was universally admitted to be ...”

“... V.S. Pritchett’s short stories are retrospective, provincial, formless and feminine. His is an art that does not care how peripheral it sometimes seems. There are no twists, payoffs, reverses, jackpots or epiphanies. Pritchett never rubs life up the wrong way, and is happy to leave only a faint shine on its fur ...”

“... or event – these seem to be the defining characteristics of the short story for both V.S. Pritchett, in his introduction to The Oxford Book of Short Stories, and Walter Allen, in his critical survey, The Short Story in English. ‘The short story,’ writes Allen, is ‘rooted in a single incident or perception’; its effect ‘is nearer to that of ...”

“... In 1976, V.S. Pritchett remarked that ‘what has always struck me in Irish writing is the sense of Ireland itself, its past or its imagined future, as a presence or invisible character.’ He added that in English short stories ‘the sense of England as an extra character is very rarely felt.’ Allowing Kipling as one obvious exception, Pritchett was too modest to mention what is probably the finest and most ambitious of his own longer stories, ‘When my girl comes home ...”

“... the question of the degree and nature of commitment nagged like an aching tooth. In 1948, V.S. Pritchett set out his views of the problem in the course of an exchange of letters being written for publication. Writers, he said, enlarged the knowledge of human nature, but in the present time was that enough? Ought they not, perhaps, to be putting their ...”

“... authors have died in the course of Britain’s current and by now customary hard winter. V.S. Pritchett writes, nearby, about one of them, and I would like to write about another – the novelist, Barbara Pym. To think of her in relation to a literary world, with its apparatus of publicity and reward, gives a sense of incongruity, but, of ...”

“... In what is by far the best study yet of the ways his stories and plays work and got written, V.S. Pritchett shows how simply and naturally Chekhov gravitated to the stage while remaining all the while a story-writer. No more than his hero does Pritchett contrast or separate the two. Himself one of the best of modern ...”

“... illuminate, intrigue and divert at the same time, which is why a master of the genre like V.S. Pritchett is himself both critic and creator. As man of letters and critic, Pritchett covered all the ground. His collected criticism.† a rich and massive volume, examines as a many authors as all 12 volumes of Scrutiny; and ...”

“... hardly measures up to this panegyric to megalomania. No such slackly gushing verbiage in V.S. Pritchett’s collection of travel essays, At Home and Abroad: Every adjective in place, every sentence balanced and settled, every judgment considered, every piece a model of composure, whether Pritchett is disserting on ...”

“... by seeing it through them. In this category are Tolstoy, Chekhov; and in our age the late V.S. Pritchett and Alice Munro. Alice Munro is such a good writer that nobody bothers anymore to judge her goodness, as people long ago stopped judging Pritchett’s – her reputation is like a good address. She is surely ...”

“... to advice, especially from John Gardner but also, more remotely, from Hemingway, Chekhov and V.S. Pritchett. One of the things he learned was the need for arduous revision, draft after draft. Another lesson was that the writer needs to trust the tale. Lawrence notoriously advised the reader to do so, but the writer has to trust it because it will collaborate ...”