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“... role. For all Hughes’s throwaway manner and air of untroubled expertise (he sometimes reads like William Empson trying his hand at a tale of adventure), there is, as with Kipling, a kind of innocence which is part of the charm. When Amabel Williams-Ellis, who read the first draft of A High Wind for him, sensibly objected that there could not but have been ...”

“... and re-crossed by many of the novelists he most admires, including the three (Angela Carter, William Golding and Angus Wilson) to whose memory his book is dedicated. The result is a history of the modern novel in which the coincidence of the mainstream and the canon are taken for granted. D.J. Taylor also confines a his attentions to mainstream ...”

“... cerebral and beautiful. It aspired to art and was art. Notwithstanding marvellously rich work by William Golding, Iris Murdoch and the grossly under-rated Angus Wilson, the English novel at this time seemed to some of us to be pottering into near-extinction as a serious art form. As Johnson put it, ‘literary forms do become exhausted, clapped out, as ...”

“... Despair is riding its lame horse.’ If there’s a pattern for Crace’s career, it’s perhaps William Golding. The suggestion isn’t new: Frank Kermode proposed it on the basis of a shared imaginative intensity, an ‘almost fanatical concentration on a particular time and a particular object’. Kermode, reviewing Crace’s Quarantine, cited The ...”

“... William Golding’s new novel, Fire Down Below is the third volume of a trilogy, the other parts being Rites of Passage and Close Quarters. The trilogy is about a voyage to Sydney in 1813, and a bald, merely literal account might run like this ... On the first page the hero appears, Edmund FitzHenry Talbot, an unformed young man of good family who is going out to help govern New South Wales in an aged line-of-battle ship, Captain Anderson commander, and who has been given a book in which to record his journey by his godfather, an influential peer ...”

“... The story, reprinted in Peake’s Progress, first appeared alongside stories by John Wyndham and William Golding in 1956, in a collection called Sometime, Never. Taken together the three stories read more like fables than fantasy or science fiction, and they glance curiously at the contemporary world they are not directly seeking to imitate. But whereas ...”

“... finding a place for transcendent values, must be the pursuit of English novelists.’ It is William Golding who comes top here: he has ‘wed his sense of a transcendent evil and good to the fully felt social novel that the English have constructed in their great tradition’. Few people will dissent, I imagine, from this rating of Mr ...”

“... borrows a few tics from Dickens, strays at times (unintentionally, I think) into the territory of William Golding and Iris Murdoch – but it does go in for resurrection in a big way. It digs up the past in all directions. The major strand of the plot concerns an archaeological site in Dorset, the excavation of a tumulus thought to be about 4500 years ...”

“... answer the Wellsian position in vaguely Wellsian terms’, but this does not ring true. William Golding perhaps did that in Lord of the Flies (cp. Moreau), in The Inheritors (cp. ‘The Grisly Folk’), in ‘Envoy Extraordinary’ (cp. Wells’s Outline of History): but Lewis would deny every one of Wells’s fundamental propositions. What one ...”

“... anguish, it is necessary for representation – i.e. language – to become anguished, as William Golding in Pincher Martin knew. Pi never stops being charming. More damaging to Pi’s integrity as a fictional character is that, having been established as a boy with an omnivorous spiritual hunger, he hardly ever thinks of God while at sea. There ...”

“... novelist, he has confounded his readers’ expectations with a work utterly unlike his last. William Golding – another ironic pasticheur – used to do this unfailingly, to the bemusement of reviewers who wanted to keep him permanently pegged to his recasting of Ballantyne in Lord of the Flies. Like ...”

“... sins to a priest is like coughing to a cop, will hardly stand up against, say, the theology of William Blake. The name ‘Satan’ in the Old Testament means something like ‘accuser’, and represents the demonic image of God of those who insist on regarding him as an avenging judge. Part of the point in seeing God in this hostile, Nobodaddy fashion is ...”

“... of high vocation as of obedient professionalism: a Phi Beta Kappa poem for Harvard, a poem for William Golding on his 75th birthday, a poem for Amnesty International, Irish Section, on Human Rights Day, 1985. And there are signs, too, that Heaney has set himself to learn from the oblique, clandestine parables and allegories which poets of Eastern ...”

“... who started publishing fiction in the 1950s – Butor and Murdoch but also Anthony Burgess, William Golding, Muriel Spark and Pynchon – and who were not just trying to make sense of our lives but, as Kermode put it, ‘making sense of the ways we try to make sense of our lives’.For Murray, ‘a real Pynchon thing’ is the mode of thinking ...”

“... Critical Quarterly set out to remedy this, promoting such new arrivals on the literary scene as William Golding, Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin and Sylvia Plath, all of whom soon became effectively canonised by their presence on school syllabuses. Critical Quarterly was committed to the centrality of poetry, fiction and drama to the living ...”