Search Results

“... What was it​ about those two letters that used to intrigue me so much? I was about ten years old when I began to notice (and indeed obsess over) such things, so I suppose the year must have been 1971. At the time I was composing a long, complicated spy story called Manhunt, and to make the title look more official on the front of the exercise book in which I was writing it, I added the two letters at the end of the word, in tiny block capitals, subscript ...”

“... Once a writer passes the age of 70, it’s hard to write anything about him that doesn’t sound like an obituary. The precedents for a sudden upsurge in creative energy after this age are very few, so the urge, for critic and biographer alike, is to look for patterns, to trace threads, to mark peaks and troughs – to impose a form, in other words, on the chaos of the work and the life ...”

“... those who are content simply to bang it together with panel pins and a tube or two of Gripfill. Jonathan Coe is undoubtedly the craftsman – a counter-sinking, dove-tailing, professional-finishing kind of writer. But he does get away with the occasional bodge. The framing device for his new novel, The Rotters’ Club, for example, seems to be held ...”

“... In Like a Fiery Elephant, his recent biography of B.S. Johnson,* Jonathan Coe writes feelingfully about the perils of too much Eng. Lit. He ‘emerged from the experience of reading English at Cambridge’, he explains in the introduction, ‘imbued with a thriving, unshakeable contempt for anyone who had had the temerity to attempt the writing of literature in the last seventy or eighty years ...”

“... Neal Ascherson, Mary Beard, Jonathan Coe, Tom Crewe, William Davies, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Lorna Finlayson, Daniel Finn, Katrina Forrester, Jeremy Harding, Daisy Hildyard, Colin Kidd, James Meek, Ferdinand Mount, Jan-Werner Müller, Jonathan Parry, David RuncimanNeal Ascherson‘On​ 17 June poor France fell ...”

“... Britain, making it ‘unquiet, haunted’. Number 11 is a kind of sequel to What a Carve Up!, Coe’s satirical masterpiece of 1994, but it’s very different in tone: the raging satire has been dampened down, leaving melancholy edged with dread. It’s drizzly, the forecast might say, with a chance of supernatural doom. Number 11 follows What a Carve ...”

“... People think they like reading Jonathan Coe’s novels for any number of reasons. For their satirical sharpness, for instance: What a Carve Up! (1994) – the carve-up in question involving agriculture, politics and the media – seemed to express exactly what people felt about greed, corruption and class entitlement in the 1980s ...”

“... One​ of the inhabitants of Middle England, the title and the setting of Jonathan Coe’s last novel, part of a location that is also called ‘merrie’, ‘deep’ and ‘old’, thinks that she and others ‘might be living cheek-by-jowl in the same country, but they also lived in different universes’. The language in which these universes fail to communicate is politics, and one of the great insights of the novel is that politics is so often just that: a language and not a topic ...”

“... Wyatt did a cover of ‘Stalin wasn’t stallin’’ in 1981. In his introduction to this book Jonathan Coe remembers Old Rottenhat as the album that ‘crystallised the emerging ruthlessness of the Thatcherite tendency’. The best of Wyatt’s tell-it-like-it-is songs is ‘Born Again Cretin’: ‘Let Mandela rot in prison/… Read him George ...”

“... onto our glory. Meanwhile, though, history hadn’t stopped. It was being made and written; and in Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up! (1994), it found the novel it was hiding from. This book is a brilliantly sustained spoof of many things: old film comedies, old detective stories, old chatty novels, stage farces – not everyone would connect Jean Cocteau ...”

“... Gothic horror tale, detective mystery, autobiography, political history: Jonathan Coe’s appealingly ambitious new novel involves a promiscuous intermingling of literary genres, as a potted social history of Thatcherism is tucked inside some meta-textual high jinks. An anatomy of the appalling Winshaw family, Thatcherite predators of one ilk or another, provides the lens for a scabrous critique of Tory Britain; but at the source of the family’s history lies a mysterious murder, so that the text simultaneously yields us a camped-up whodunnit ...”

“... be bloody writing novels about it, you should be out there bloody doing something about it.’ Jonathan Coe drops in to tell Maxwell Sim that his book is about to end; Sim looks ‘into the eyes of a serial killer’, and suspects that ‘beneath his courteous exterior, this guy was full of nothing but conceit and self-admiration.’ In At ...”

“... of the children he taught as a supply teacher called him a ‘fiery elephant’, which is where Coe gets his title (though he thinks the child meant to call his enormous instructor a ‘fairy elephant’ ). It may be true that in the 1960s and early 1970s Johnson was, as Coe’s publishers maintain, ‘one of the ...”

“... What is it really about, and why was it written like this? The questions are never unreasonable when confronted with works that suggest the possibility of other meanings present beneath the surface level of realism, and when a reader has to decide whether suggested profundities really exist or in fact resemble what Eliot in old age called his notes to The Waste Land, an exhibition of bogus scholarship ...”

“... David Runciman, Neal Ascherson, James Butler, T.J. Clark, Jonathan Coe, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Daniel Finn, Dawn Foster, Jeremy Harding, Colin Kidd, Ross McKibbin, Philippe Marlière, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Jan-Werner Müller, Susan Pedersen, J.G.A. Pocock, Nick Richardson, Nicholas Spice, Wolfgang Streeck, Daniel TrillingDavid RuncimanSo who​ is to blame? Please don’t say the voters: 17,410,742 is an awful lot of people to be wrong on a question of this magnitude ...”