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“... 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 ...”

“... from Thwaite himself, the few who are spared include figures like Vernon Watkins, Gavin Ewart, Barbara Pym: allies who are genuinely liked and admired but who are nonetheless junior to Larkin in talent and repute. The really big hates tend to be reserved for sizable poetic rivals. Ted Hughes is a recurrent, near-obsessive target, with S. Heaney ...”

“... Stalinism. He and Robert Conquest had also been amused by advance word of Larkin’s letters to Barbara Pym (‘I bet they were a bit different in tone from what he writes to you and me, eh?’). At the same time, he was unsettled by finding out how much Larkin had kept from him of his arrangements in Hull – principally the depth of his involvements ...”

“... upset’). Then there were the judgments of critics. She was compared, inevitably, with Barbara Pym and Beryl Bainbridge (the latter she thought ‘a good corrective to vanity’), and was informed by a pundit at a soirée that she had to be in Pym’s ‘group’: ‘You either have to be in hers or ...”

“... to take off his shirt’). At times I felt I was reading a cosmopolitan, if not actually louche, Barbara Pym, in a faded fastidiousness, or fastidious fadedness, which is so smoothly done that it, and almost everything but the style, can slip by unnoticed. But the after-effect is poignant and strong. There is a slight wobble of intention evident in the ...”

“... taken many forms, not all mindlessly Philistine, and Trilling would be disconcerted today to find Barbara Pym a new heroine of the campus course, and her novels the subject of doctorates. One suspects he would backtrack hastily, for as Krupnick says, ‘it was in the logic of his position as enemy of all orthodoxies that he should disavow any ...”

“... A great many novels nowadays are just travel books,’ Ivy Compton-Burnett grumbled to Barbara Pym in 1960. ‘Olivia has just published one about Bulgaria.’ She hadn’t noticed that the setting of The Great Fortune is in fact Romania. But she had a point. Journeys, voluntary and enforced, are big in Olivia Manning’s work, as they had been in the first forty years of her life, and the painter manqué in her always made the most of topographical detail ...”

“... of the final version, I knew how to spell besieged.’ (She admits to having studied the comedy of Barbara Pym.)The pieces​ in Essays Two, though even more refined in the direction of specialists, brim with daring experiments, not all of which succeed but none of which is boring. When she deconstructs translation, wading in murkier terrain, I was ...”

“... off: this is what explains the canny simple-mindedness of his stance, whereby Wodehouse and Barbara Pym and Mollie Panter-Downes are used to tease overweening complexity. Everything between Tolstoy on the one side and honestly unserious Wodehouse or Ian Fleming, say, on the other – Waugh, Greene, Joyce, you name it – will have for him something ...”

“... to love him. OK. I thought also of the varied and lonely excellent women in those sad and comic Barbara Pym novels, transcribing notes for doofy male anthropologists, or vying for a spot to serve lemonade at a conference. Or the pleasurably menacing Fleur Talbot in Muriel Spark’s Loitering with Intent, working as a secretary at the Autobiographical ...”

“... The autumnal title​ of Tessa Hadley’s new novel, almost in the resigned mode of Barbara Pym, is both truthful and deceptive. Relationships of love and friendship with deep roots in the past are thoughtfully examined, but the occasion is a drastic severing, placed on such an early page as to be exempt from any embargo on the revelation of plot ...”

“... the survivors, had prepared me for this. In Corso’s hutch, his minders begged for copies of Barbara Pym, while Gregory spoke wistfully of Philip Larkin. Denton Welch was William Burroughs’s main intellectual squeeze. Ferlinghetti had high hopes for Jeremy Reed. The Beats were now heritage fodder, a potential Bloomsbury group. There was even talk ...”

“... situation for a novelist is a character he didn’t invent walking about among those that he did. Barbara Pym’s novel, An Unsuitable Attachment, the one that was rejected by her traitorous publishers, sentencing her to fifteen years of non-appearance, has a man in it with whom she can do nothing at all, except let him marry the heroine at the end. This ...”

“... ridicule, as in the case of Clare Booth Luce’s play, The Women. The extraordinary success of Barbara Pym’s novels in America shows they seem to minister to the same assertiveness, and the same desire for separation. A perennial Pym scene, drawn from life once or twice in her Diaries, is of the women’s part of ...”

“... and ‘Independent’ in the old carefree way. Three years later followed The Reign of King Pym, a masterly study of Parliamentary politics during the early years of the English Revolution which has dominated historical thinking ever since. In 1952, he published More’s Utopia: The Biography of an Idea, a competent but not epoch-making work. Since then ...”