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“... were it not for the occasional respite with the aunts, who might have strayed from the pages of Barbara Pym; their gentle, feline malice is a balm to the spirit. It is not surprising that Liddell should be the author of a critical study of Miss Pym, and of a memoir of Elizabeth Taylor and Ivy Compton Burnett. When ...”

“... Bishop of Newark, USA, thereby making satire almost impossible. Only John Betjeman and Barbara Pym stood gallantly with their fingers in the dyke upholding a vision of the dear old ecclesia anglicana as it once was. A.N. Wilson’s anthology, however, rides nobly to their rescue. It is a wonderfully evocative work drenched in a sense of a ...”

“... page as I write.’ That is Denton Welch, who liked to write ‘as I write’. His great admirer, Barbara Pym, liked to record buying matching underclothes, chosen for the pleasure of imagining someone else seeing them. This is an important aspect of love in a diary – you imagine the loved one reading it, and giggle all the more at the thought. ...”

“... novel The Slaves of Solitude, with its heroine the lonely spinster Miss Roach. This was the new Barbara Pym country, and he did not quite make it his own. The same applies to an unfinished trilogy, set in Brighton, about a psychopath and potential murderer, Ralph Gorse. Haunting and memorable as its early part is, with the sense of something really ...”

“... more robust. Whatever ‘went wrong’ in the lives and fates of Jane Austen, Elizabeth Bowen, Barbara Pym, they used it as a source of comedy, as the inspiration for their formidable sense of fun. They are all quite different otherwise, and so is Anita Brookner: and yet the resemblances are unmistakable. Something about you is a bit of a ...”

“... of course, that her novels and stories went unacknowledged in her lifetime. Angela Carter was no Barbara Pym. She was not neglected or rejected (except by the National Theatre, who turned down her version of Lulu a few years ago). She was given solus reviews and publishers’ parties; she went on telly; she was courted by universities and nobbled by ...”

“... so much so, in fact, that one might have mistaken the author for a sort of half-Cantonese would-be Barbara Pym, a candidate member of the school of downbeat English ironists. Wallace Nolasco, the novel’s hero, is a Macao-born ‘Portuguese’ Chinese who marries into the household of the Poons, a wealthy Hongkong Cantonese family who need to marry off ...”

“... by the mob. Philip Larkin used to exhibit the same tendency when asked to name his lineup: Barbara Pym, Stevie Smith, Betjeman. Larkin, of course, is the one contemporary to whom Amis is prepared to yield high marks (Robert Conquest, perhaps the most ‘all right’ of Kingsley’s literary cronies, is shunted off into ‘light verse’). Larkin ...”

“... by mail-order. Although, being a man, his style and approach are far more emphatic than those of Barbara Pym, there is here something of her own journal’s assumption of faith through triviality. Toynbee was well aware that his own ploy of self-ridicule was an extension of vanity, but it was a very natural extension. He had always seen himself as a ...”

“... her chosen genre. Davey’s work is also allied to the tradition of novelists like Jean Rhys, Barbara Pym or Anita Brookner, who quietly insist on the persistence of alienation, domestic or otherwise, in women’s lives. Breakdowns in communication between the sexes punctuate her dialogue. ‘She could see him thinking she was an odd girl and that ...”

“... put into my head by Anthony Thwaite’s selection of the poet’s letters. Booth, together with Barbara Everett, is among the few critics who have produced real illumination about the way the poems work: ways of working which notoriously have become more and more indefinable the more public and popular a figure the poet has become – and indeed the more he ...”

“... Erle to get her heroine the desired husband. It seems that in her study of the novel in verse Barbara Gelpi has even seen the villainous and sexually predatory Lady Waldemar, who arranges Marian’s abduction and rape, as Aurora’s Jungian ‘shadow’. Certainly Aurora first accepts and then rejects the idea of independent woman plus child represented ...”

“... like something quieter and what I fantasise about is something which does not yet exist – the ‘Barbara Pym Crampton Hodnett’ pinball game. In the story painted by this machine’s graphics (watercolour, of course), the layout will be formal and the ball will roll gently up garden paths and then, having reached the top of its arc and flirted gently ...”

“... What is lacking is the note of intimacy, the tone so natural to Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Barbara Pym or Elizabeth Bowen that their readers (perhaps particularly the male ones) only notice it in terms of their own feeling of gratified response to what seems a subtlety of fellow-feeling, a gratifyingly tacit appeal to their own insight and ...”

“... off’, in Padgett’s phrase, to his willingness to spend his days immersed in the fiction of Barbara Pym rather than taking the Manhattan art world by storm. He experienced a ‘speed-crisis’ around 1976, one he’d anticipated some years earlier: ‘A mad fiend, yes,’ he wrote of the pills that kept him humming, ‘but I’m willing to pay. The ...”