“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... born. Richler prints a vivid – and typically too-brief – extract from Staring at the Sun by Julian Barnes (b. 1946), although nothing from Shuttlecock, by Graham Swift (b. 1949), which gives the best description I know of the territory, real and psychological, in which his generation grew up in Britain: What attracted me then about Camber was less ...”

“... when British writers imitated South Americans, as they often used to do in the 1980s and 1990s). Julian Barnes skewered this ‘package-tour baroque’ in Flaubert’s Parrot: Ah, the propinquity of cheap life and expensive principles, of religion and banditry, of surprising honour and random cruelty. Ah, the daiquiri bird which incubates its eggs on ...”

“... writer,’ he replies: ‘I write too.’ Then he asks her: ‘Tell me, do you enjoy the novels of ...”

“... ever in Chipping Camden.’ This is all we’re allowed to see. ‘Is this frustrating?’ Julian Barnes asked in his introduction to the 2013 edition. ‘Yes. Is it unfair? A little. Is it calculated? Exactly so.’Fitzgerald’s working papers, held at the Harry Ransom Center in Texas, reveal hints of the future she imagined for Chiara and ...”

“... of his divorce; a parting of ways with his agent Pat Kavanagh and her husband, his great friend, Julian Barnes; the near-death of his mentor Saul Bellow; the discovery that his maternal cousin Lucy Partington, missing since she disappeared without trace in December 1973, had been one of the victims of Fred West. To contemplate this sequence is to see ...”

“... his account of nature is often amusing, or sensitive, it can be astonishingly unsentimental. As Julian Barnes, a long-time Renard enthusiast, writes in his preface to this new selection, translated by Theo Cuffe, ‘there are no Jemima Puddleducks and flopsy bunnies in Renard’s world; or rather bunnies are only flopsy when in the mouth of a gun ...”

“... of the bike sheds, crack out the Rothmans and floor the wits with some incredibly dirty jokes. ‘Julian Barnes has said that novelists don’t write “about” their themes and subjects but “around” them,’ Amis has said, ‘and this is very much my sense of it’: Einstein’s Monsters ‘consisted of five short stories around nuclear weapons and ...”

“... Weaver translates tagliatelle as ‘noodles’, which would hardly be felt necessary today). Julian Barnes, in a tough and very thorough review of Lydia Davis’s translation of Flaubert, summed up the issue: ‘If you want the book in “English”,’ he asks, ‘what sort of English do you choose? Put simply, on the novel’s first page, do you ...”

“... the author Carkin, Lartin, Lackin, Laikin and Lock. I sit in the front row with Blake Morrison, Julian Barnes and Andrew Motion. There are more poems and reminiscences but it’s all a bit thin and jerky. Now Patrick G. arrives, bringing the video of the film he made of Larkin in 1965 but there is further delay because while the machine works there is ...”

“... her work, a faint watermark of the Almighty visible if you hold her writings up to the light. Like Julian Barnes in Nothing to Be Frightened of, she did not believe in God, but she missed him, in her case as an amputee misses a limb, the phantom pain accompanying every waking moment, a constant reminder that what should have been there wasn’t. If her ...”

“... young British novelists are and you may well be told Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, William Boyd, Julian Barnes. Given that writers typically have long careers and get better with age, ‘young’ is not entirely a misnomer applied here. Like politicians, novelists can be youthful long after the point at which the careers of athletes or pop-stars are ...”

“... fiction – most remarkably, perhaps, the novels of Peter Ackroyd, D.M. Thomas, Beryl Bainbridge, Julian Barnes and Thomas Keneally, whose Schindler’s Ark was marketed in America (under a slightly different title) as non-fiction and in Britain as a novel. Writers of light fiction, too, have added to the enrichment of their work by introducing people ...”

“... Friday lunches Hitchens used to attend, along with people like Amis, Craig Raine, Mark Boxer, Julian Barnes and others. This seems mainly to have consisted of replacing regular words with slightly or much ruder ones: house becomes ‘sock’ (as it does in Amis’s genuinely funny novel Money), man becomes ‘cunt’ or ‘prong’. So you get A Cunt ...”