Issyvoo

Sinclair’s people don’t come to life because he wasn’t that interested in real-life people. He was interested in, and being paid to write about, a social issue.

Halwai’s lesson in The White Tiger is that poverty creates monsters, and he himself is just such a monster.

Perhaps it is all a joke, meant to fool literary London, terrified of seeming prudish, into respect for rubbish.

…the reader is caught up in it, mysteriously affected and at moments quite profoundly moved.

Because her imaginative world is so idiosyncratic, so easily recognizable, she is open to the charge of repetition, even of self-parody, but the accusation will not stick in any serious sense, for those aspects which are very similar to one another are the least significant.

She sets her farce boiling away in the first hundred pages, then plunges through it with a dramatic gesture…

…A Meeting by the River is three times as saccharine as I can take.

MacNeice, though closely associated with Auden and others, stood apart from them. He had a detachments from the then fashionable ideology and would, one feels, have been more at home with the aesthetes of the 1890s.

Lucid and lightly elegant though the prose is, there is something of James Joyces’s Ulysses[…]it is in the feeling that the book conveys that a man can be quite insignificant to the world at large, and beset by all the sins and ills of humanity, yet still live an intensely acceptable life.

If she did not sit so tight on her natural religious bent she would be a featherweight able to knock out.

The World in the Evening is far too shadowy for good photography, and the one thing Mr. Isherwood does not try to be in this, his new novel, is a camera.

…Mr Christopher Isherwood has never seemed to claim more than unworldliness for his Berlin figures…

For the sake of this Victorian Spectre and its equipment of panic and foreboding it is easy to overlook the equally Victorian weakness of the novel, the freakishly constructed characters, their odd behaviour, and Miss du Maurier’s sometimes individual grammar.

Dracula cannot be described as a domestic novel, nor its annals as those of a quiet life. The circumstances described are from the first peculiar.