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“... here – so that when the literary father-figures he has in mind turn out to be Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan, it’s hard to believe him. Father’s ghost has to be grander. And he is. Adair the novelist’s true problem, which Amis notoriously shares, is with Nabokov. Adair’s 1990 novel, Love and Death on Long ...”

“... door of the bathroom I had noticed that the bidet was full of signed first editions of books by Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan and other members of the most powerful literary mafia to hit London since old Dr Ben Johnson ruled the roost. When I carried Martin through into the kitchen for that so-long-delayed welcoming drink, the refrigerator was full of ...”

“... writers, and this unlikely simile is quoted in a recent work testifying to that detailed interest: Julian Barnes in Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) made a clever novel out of a preoccupation with the minutiae of Flaubert’s life, inventing a biographer-narrator to fight a long rearguard action against the death of the author. Mario Vargas Llosa’s The ...”

“... end of the 1970s, the Eye stumbled into a period of pointless malice and political irrelevance: Julian Barnes saw how bad things threatened to become when he reviewed Patrick Marnham’s book about the magazine – a kind of ‘Private Eye at 21’ – in the LRB in 1982 (‘the radical lampoon has become required reading on the magazine syllabus of ...”

“... of their mothers before they married. In one of the pseudonymously offered novels under review, Julian Barnes writes as ‘Dan Kavanagh’, having recently married Pat Kavanagh, the literary agent, who is the dedicatee of Duffy. Harder to crack is the pseudonymous code of Michael Crichton, the omnicompetent ‘movelist’. (He is author of The ...”

“... The man​  in the title of Julian Barnes’s eighth work of non-fiction is the Parisian physician Samuel Pozzi. The red coat, or perhaps it’s a dressing-gown, is what he is wearing in the 1881 portrait by John Singer Sargent, Dr Pozzi at Home. It is a swashbuckling, very theatrical portrait, one that would make anyone curious about its subject ...”

“... and rather frightening when people ignore, or don’t understand, jokes made at their expense. Julian Barnes once wrote a salutary essay on this, recalling the great Monty Python sketch about an obscure island completely inhabited by men sounding and looking like Alan Whicker. They paced to and fro, droning horribly and trailing microphones. It ...”

“... public money must, however boringly, require; and the New eventually went the way of the Old. But Julian Barnes makes a good point that might be overlooked: ‘the magazine was sustained far less by public money than by the devotion of an impoverished staff.’ Barnes also gives a lively account of the good times ...”

“... as a model for this new investigation. In 1946, George Orwell, Stephen Spender, Herbert Read and Julian Maclaren-Ross each testified that he could manage on £1000 a year net. V.S. Pritchett needed a bit more. Elizabeth Bowen raised a few eyebrows at the time by confessing that ‘I would like to have £3500 a year net’ and Cyril Connolly, who organised ...”

“... address from a monarchy whose sworn historic duty is the defence of the realm and its subjects?As Julian Barnes has recently pointed out, the same curious omission occurs in the memoirs of Baroness Thatcher. Never jollier than when seconding Good Queen Bess at Tilbury, and repudiating any foreigner who durst trespass on the rights of English subjects and ...”

“... should not persist in thinking that translation is all about loss – as so many people do, and as Julian Barnes did in these pages in 2010, with his fine phrase suggesting that the best translation can offer us only ‘a new way of necessarily falling short’.* No fidelity at all wouldn’t fall short: the old text would just have vanished. And plural ...”

“... owing something to Heidegger. It defamiliarises, which is what this novel itself is good at doing. Julian Barnes’s characters might have stepped out of a novel of the Sixties: well-armed, on guard against themselves and others, prone to interesting traumas but masters of social strategy. The successful novelist, the historian (‘he was, he knew, a very ...”

“... and he wouldn’t be called Tony Churt if he did. Headlong is a novel which, like recent books by Julian Barnes (England, England) and Alan Hollinghurst (The Spell), treats rural England as if it was a domestic Transylvania, a place where normality can’t survive one uneasy night or apparently innocuous dinner party. Some of Frayn’s funniest writing ...”

“... the newspaper Le Matin after 1906. Assembled posthumously as Novels in Three Lines (reviewed by Julian Barnes in the LRB of 4 October 2007), these news snippets relate romantic crimes and other mishaps in such a way that subjective will sometimes turns into objective fate: ‘“If my candidate loses, I will kill myself,” M. Bellavoine, of ...”

“... formal intelligence and calculated entertainment, complaining of recent novels by Umberto Eco and Julian Barnes that they are too cerebral and dispassionate for his liking. Tackling a major contemporary writer who seems to have settled for quietism – V.S. Naipaul – Rushdie attributes his ‘utter weariness’ to a withering of the heart. Imaginary ...”