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“... with butch and randy gamekeepers who are thirsting to whip Young Master’s knickers down; or that Simon Raven’s heroes (to compare small things with great) hanker after both conventional success and the goodies of Gay Cockayne, which of course is very greedy of them and quite rightly leads to their resounding pratfalls. Now, none of this is dull ...”

“... The minute Dornford Yates was dead in 1960, the mating calls of envy and resentment were heard hissing over the bier. The smelly little judgments which they spawned are now grown great and paramount. Dornford Yates, the orthodox legend runs in 1982, made a fortune out of writing best-sellers which appeal to the worst in all of us. They were and are sadistic in tone and action, feudal and fascist in sympathy, the ripely festering recipes of an arrogant racist authoritarian snobby sexist old pig: they should be (indeed they often have been) removed from the school libraries to make room for books about proper people ...”

“... Loder, the Fifth Form Cad, is being blackmailed by Hogg, the new School Butler: unless Loder gives Hogg £10, Hogg will go to the Head and report Loder for smoking and drinking in the Saloon Bar of the Black Ape; whereupon Loder will be sacked. ‘I don’t care so much for myself,’ sobs Loder to Tom Merry, the Hero of the Shell: ‘It’s my parents; the disgrace will kill them ...”

“... three got the idea from the newspapers. In Morning Star (named after Lucifer, not the newspaper), Simon Raven tells of a Conservative MP whose ‘swallow’ is described as ‘a half-caste tart in India’. In First Among Equals, Jeffrey Archer introduces a Labour MP who is likewise endangered by a young black girl ‘in a white leather mini skirt so ...”

“... by the public school system, expressed in schoolmasters’ aspirations and schoolboys’ comics. Simon Raven’s notorious devotion to that system began when he was only a seven-year-old comic reader, as he admits in The Old School, a loving but mordant survey of the dormitory schools: he went on avidly to Charterhouse and he fancies other men will envy ...”

“... worldlessness of ‘all’-inclusive superstition needs to be declined. Ptolomaeos Tunne, hero of Simon Raven’s September Castle, remarks somewhere that ‘I like seeing patterns in things.’ This ‘Tale of Love’ involves, like Pilgermann, a modern relation to a journey and death in the Middle Ages, and also goes some way with the supernatural: but ...”

“... to the novelist to have something to write about. Bating the question of what value the rest of Simon Raven’s fictions may have, it can safely be said that An Inch of Fortune has less than the least of them, which puts it down pretty low. It was his first novel, written in 1950 with a different title, unpublished for fear of libel, long buried and ...”

“... from Barber, who fancies himself as rather droll (he is the author also of a witty biography of Simon Raven), and his endearing, if sometimes rather vague sense of humour ambushes almost every insight. ‘Although a regular churchgoer,’ he writes, ‘Violet took a liberal attitude towards sex, the wilder shores of which intrigued her as much as her ...”

“... Sixties, all this was incomprehensible. John Buchan was either ‘a very odd fish indeed’, as Simon Raven thought, or at least preposterous (John Gross). The difficulty arises not just in the slack and foolish passages in the books, but where their Victorian foundations have fallen in. By that, I mean not just certain notions that were old-fashioned ...”

“... best with the now well-known stories (how I bowdlerised The Carpetbaggers in a weekend; how I paid Simon Raven fifteen quid a week to stay out of London and write, etc). And he has been permitted to shy a stone or two at some of his enemies (notably André Deutsch, who – apparently – has had the gall to demand back an advance from Blond). There is ...”

“... in Northern Ireland has been overtaken by a surge of zeal, with warmongers confident of a hearing. Simon Raven’s army was not like the army that has been freighted to an Armageddon in the South Atlantic. In his memoir Shadows on the Grass,* embellished by a fine cover from Lawrence Toynbee which does summery justice to its cricketing occasions, ...”

“... seems to be aiming at the kind of lid-off-society’s-nastiness that used to be the property of Simon Raven. That, however, only defines itself as his territory as the book progresses. The best of the earlier stories, ‘The Bugle’, has an adult narrator returning to his elderly parents’ house and finding himself drawn back into the cobwebs of ...”

“... Frenchmen’. Yet she was subject to intense sexism from critics. A review by the mischief-making Simon Raven in the Spectator in 1966, titled ‘Brophy and Brigid’, divided her into ‘the incomparable’ Brophy, an ‘intelligent writer of clear masculine prose’ – by which Raven seemed to mean mainly her ...”

“... mansion in Richmond and reading deeply in the mathematics and astronomy of Herschel and Pierre-Simon Laplace. In 1830, aged 21, after spells at the University of Virginia and in the army, he enrolled at the West Point military academy, the foremost scientific college in the antebellum United States, which drew its teaching principles and extensive library ...”

“... The ghosts we deserve’ was the Listener’s headline for Simon Raven’s review of Gwen Raverat’s Period Piece in December 1952. Most reviewers had gushed with sentimental enthusiasm for these memoirs of a late Victorian academic childhood in Cambridge, so helping to make them one of the most ‘unlikely bestsellers’ of the later 20th century (the book has never been out of print and in Cambridge, at least, still sells briskly to locals and tourists alike ...”