Colm Tóibín
[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.
Authors Robert McCrum
Robert McCrum’s opinions
-
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.
-
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.
Robert McCrum
Doris Lessing
Philip Pullman
His Dark Materials