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“... If you’re a man in a book by Beryl, believe me, you’re in very great peril! Unsure of purpose, weak and wobbly, or stern and strong, small bum, knees knobbly, Accidental-On-Purpose Death before the end will stop your breath! You’ll find it’s a girl who’s the great Prime Mover when your Fate sucks you in like a ghastly Hoover ...”

“... Under her somewhat demotic exterior, Beryl Bainbridge is concerned (which hardly seems the right word) with myths. Her dealings with them, virtually invisible, are unportentous in the extreme, perhaps too unportentous for her own good – though not for theirs. They need invisibility, being commonly regarded as ancient prescriptions, commandments and warnings, bullying and surely obsolete, for leading our lives ...”

“... historical whispers, aiming to ‘disimprison’, as Coleridge once said, ‘the soul of fact’. Beryl Bainbridge was one of the last of the pre-Google English novelists, the last, you might say, following Coleridge, for whom facts had a soul and were not simply pluckable. Take her novel Master Georgie, set in the Crimean War. While reading it, I ...”

“... used to be published by Duckworth, as were or are Caroline Blackwood, Alice Thomas Ellis and Beryl Bainbridge: all practise surprise and cultivate oddly-angled observation. There remains a certain strained resemblance between Fitzgerald and Bainbridge, though the latter is less elegant and altogether more wicked ...”

“... with. Henchard in The Mayor of Casterbridge sells his wife. J.S. Watson, at the beginning of Beryl Bainbridge’s new novel, buys his. John Selby Watson was (for this is historical fact) the headmaster of a South London grammar school. He had humble, Hardian origins; his parents had given him away in infancy, and he grew up with no experience of ...”

“... All through Beryl Bainbridge’s latest novel, characters dwell on chance and fate, and the string of coincidences that link their lives. These aren’t new preoccupations for Bainbridge; one of the striking things about her earlier novels was the rather ambivalent way in which chance was used ...”

“... sentimental and cynical snob. This year we have more contributions to the cartography of class – Beryl Bainbridge’s benign Forever England follows up her television series. Alan Sillitoe has written a coffee-table book, Nottinghamshire, with photographs by David Sillitoe. And David Selbourne has put his New Society pieces together in Left ...”

“... rejected, though he undoubtedly played an unsavoury role in the events leading up to her death. Beryl Bainbridge, in her novel Young Adolf, adopts only the relatively plausible, if probably apocryphal, tale of Hitler’s visit to Liverpool, and uses it to place Hitler with barbed accuracy in the petit bourgeois milieu to which he belonged and which is ...”

“... Brendan King​ starts with a difficulty: Beryl Bainbridge’s writing. It makes everyone else’s prose look flabby. But he also has an advantage: his particular knowledge of her life. King worked with Bainbridge for more than twenty years. He looked after her admin and edited her last novel for publication after her death ...”

“... by feral cleverness, is too convincing for the story to become a mechanical roundabout of love. Beryl Bainbridge’s descriptions of Stella’s perceptions remind one of animal thoughts in the novels of Henry Williamson. Smells, for example, are important, and it is usually Stella who smells them: She stayed behind dipping her nose like a pecking hen ...”

“... to be enigmatic for?’ Or words to that effect. The question kept coming into my head as I read Beryl Bainbridge’s new novel, which is set on the Titanic during the four days before she sank, and narrated in the first person by a survivor whose first and only name is Morgan. The title, Every Man for Himself, suggests that human selfishness is going ...”

“... and again, though, some figures do get aired and 20 grand a year seems to be the favoured target. Beryl Bainbridge owns up to making £35,000 and Michael Holroyd regards £70,000 as a decent haul. Will Self can manage on anything between £40,000 and £80,000. At the bottom end of the scale there are poets who would happily settle for a regular 12 ...”

“... for her victory. The book, he said, ‘resembles the Life of Jackie Charlton as written by Beryl Bainbridge’. He clearly meant this as a huge insult – but to whom? Interviewers who had not had time to look at the book went to see Atkinson with a set of expectations which she quickly shattered. Atkinson has a degree in English literature, and ...”

“... a natural aptitude for’ and cold white wine. There’s another version of modern primitivism in Beryl Bainbridge’s first novel, which she brought out in 1968 and has now rewritten. Much of Another part of wood has the raw quality of material hardly touched by the imagination that has made her something of a phenomenon of the Seventies. Yet it is ...”

“... in one of the most routine sentences Moore has ever written, the words ‘a quarter to nine’. Beryl Bainbridge’s An Awfully Big Adventure he denounced as being a novel ‘about a charming little girl written by a charming big girl’. Books don’t come slimmer than that. Some critics seemed to think that male writers must have been strenuously ...”