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“... The Australian film-maker Peter Weir’s The Year of Living Dangerously is set in Djakarta shortly before the failed Communist coup of 1965. The story concerns three characters: Guy Hamilton, a half-Australian, half-American reporter working on his first big assignment for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation; Jill Bryant, English assistant to the British military attachè; and Billy Kwan, a dwarf-like photographer who is half-Australian, half-Chinese, and who takes secret photographs and keeps lengthy files on the other characters, especially the ones he cares about ...”

“... polished collections of stories is in much the same fix. I am speaking here of Mavis Gallant, Rachel Ingalls and Grace Paley, all ladies in a world where some of us try hard to be lads,1 and short stories written by ladies are little different from shoes: they need breaking in. During the course of the past two months, I hobbled dutifully between my ...”

“... unsatisfactory, but, like all Carolyn Slaughter’s work, impressive. In her novel Mrs Caliban Rachel Ingalls displayed both unusual anthropomorphism and unusual narrative power. Both these attributes are in evidence once again in Binstead’s Safari, which transforms the story of a tired marriage – that of the Binsteads – and an expedition ...”

“... that could be clearer. Blight, on a smaller scale, and more enticingly envisaged, is the theme of Rachel Ingalls’s pungent quartet of stories. ‘Pearlkillers’ are people whose skin rots pearls: involuntary destroyers. So, we have Lily, twice widowed in Vietnam (a misfortune that seems to call for a Lady Bracknell to comment on it), finding solace in ...”