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“... then, how we managed to keep up a sort of friendship for so long.’ The first half-dozen lines of Anita Brookner’s novel suggest the tone, straightforwardly realistic, and tell us the principal subject, the relationship between flamboyant upper-middle-class Julia and Fay, whose father was a cinema manager. The opening chapter’s ten pages enlarge on ...”

“... out an unwritten novel with the Craig Rainian subject of a Martian, miserably stranded on Earth. Anita Brookner should break the reader in more gently. Her fourth novel, Hotel du Lac, begins at the highest pitch of her now acclaimed ‘style’: ‘From the window all that could be seen was a receding area of grey. It was to be supposed that behind the ...”

“... who might be given the same treatment: Barbara Pym, beneath whose twinset beat a passionate heart; Anita Brookner with her neatly tailored outfits and the fine-spun auburn up-do exuding poise and sadness; and all the others who in various ways inhabit their ...”

“... Bridge (2012), Davey’s fourth novel, considers some of the troubles that accompany affluence. Anita Mostyn is born into middle-class privilege, without finding that its supposed advantages have been of any real use to her. Despite her private education and the flat her parents have helped her to buy in Chelsea, she can’t really deal with the ...”

“... takes it to its fullest realisation. Roberts’s fiction is highly allusive – she can sound like Anita Brookner, Monique Wittig, Aubrey Beardsley or the Marquis de Sade – but it’s not generic. As a woman writer of the Nineties, she has inherited feminist literary criticism as well as feminist writing, and she deliberately invokes the devils and ...”

“... on Graham Greene, Claire Tomalin on Coleridge, Anthony Burgess on Fielding, other reviews by Anita Brookner, Peter Conrad, Roy Foster and Hilary Mantel), and as the limits on the new paper’s resources became apparent I thought how hard it would be to put together pages of comparable stature. There was one solace: the Independent on Sunday would be ...”

“... Ada Leverson (1862-1933) said she had learned about human nature in the nursery. A little brother got her to help him make a carriage out of two chairs, but when he was taken out in a real carriage he was not in the least interested. Certainly she never under-estimated the human capacity for imagination or for disappointment. The nursery was in lavish 21 Hyde Park Square, and her father was a successful property investor ...”

“... his high estimate of his or her output. This can be comic and endearing. When Haffenden praises Anita Brookner for her ‘integrity’, she offers to make him a present of it. Similarly, when he tries to cheer her up by reminding her that she is, after all, ‘successful’: ‘I dispute that,’ Brookner snarls (or ...”

“... its material. It is aggressively masculine, would hardly do for themes handled by Iris Murdoch or Anita Brookner, might be found crude or distasteful by them. This style fits perfectly the activities of parthuman Keith, Nicola and Guy, less well the naive approach to nuclear weapons made by the writer of ‘Thinkability’, and the contradiction points ...”

“... compulsory qualification, nor did it suggest that Iris Murdoch should have stuck to philosophy and Anita Brookner to art; nor did it examine the tradition of novel-writing by academics; going back to the Water Babies and Alice. What the Telegraph did not like was the idea that everyone had a novel in him, and could produce one in their spare time. How ...”

“... with it, and some sort of white sauce which was about nine-tenths white wine, one-tenth cream.’ Anita Brookner, reviewing the book for the TLS, was appalled by the recipes, finding absolutely no fun in Blackwood’s culinary short cuts – particularly her use of Smash. It smacks of Renata’s instant cake mix in The Stepdaughter, of which J. is so ...”

“... let’s dutifully plough through these three bodice-rippers from Rudland and Stubbs, but call in Anita Brookner or Nadine Gordimer? No, no, we won’t do that, even if they have won the prize before. More than an abnegation of responsibility, this displayed a singular lack of curiosity. And while the judges annually complain about the great burden of ...”

“... ever after.’ This fairy-tale ending concludes what are otherwise chronicles of defeat – an Anita Brookner version of woman’s history, full of unhappiness, hardship, confusion, unfulfilment and self-destruction. But if only one out of all these women was ‘happy’ it might be worth questioning the notion of happiness rather than automatically ...”

“... or Elizabeth Taylor ignored, in their individual ways, all idea of being ‘women novelists’, as Anita Brookner does today. However ‘feminine’ their subject-matter, they don’t approach it determinedly as ‘women’. And it is ironic that Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, themselves ignoring predecessors like Fanny Burney and Jane Austen, should ...”

“... is projected. The novel was an exact diagnosis of her own character, but not, of course, a remedy. Anita Brookner, who became a friend late in Lehmann’s life, said that when she looked at her she saw ‘a woman sitting alone, inconsolable’. This of course is what Brookner always sees – a woman sitting alone is as ...”