Issyvoo

Wharton is mercilessly frank as she chronicles Lily’s fall from grace, contrasting psychological insights with descriptions of external effects. Her heroine sinks in stages…

[Tóibín] resists scepticism about American creative courses and describes how he banishes critical theory texts about texts from the seminar room , preferring, instead, to conduct his class through a line-by-line reading of the classics—Pride and Prejudice, Daniel Deronda, The Portrait of a Lady.

Here is a great contemporary woman novelist and London intellectual who has dedicated her long life and impressive body of work to the tireless and unflinching exploration of man’s (and woman’s) place in the world, together with issues of race, gender and social justice.

One strand of the book’s many arguments explores this debate between rationality and imagination. For all the author’s occasionally irritating in-jokes, it is not clear which side comes out on top.

Keillor yet again documents the adventures of a white, male, liberal, literary Midwesterner making a break for the bright lights of the East coast…

Pullman has suffered critical neglect in the same way that some very successful crime, science fiction and thriller writers have been overlooked by the bien pensant literary commentariat.

… he gives his readers precisely the satisfactions they look for in a novel: well-made, absorbing characters, supreme elegance of style and tone, a richly inventive imaginative landscape, and, finally, some very big ideas fearlessly explored. It’s not too much to ask, but it’s rarer than hen’s teeth.

…woven into this human drama is a one-sided account of the history of the period, and a crude and unremittingly hostile portrayal of the Greek communists in particular…