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“... Most of my first literary influences – if they can be called such – came from the cinema. I remember some time during the early Forties seeing a film, one of those ‘B’ pictures from Hollywood, which had for its subject the life of the great British prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli. The scene that comes back is during a debate in the House of Commons on some great issue, when Disraeli sat with eyes closed, seemingly asleep, while the Leader of the Opposition, probably Mr Gladstone, went through his speech ...”

“... theme. No one matters more to British cinema than Karel Reisz, and no one does it more honour. Alan Sillitoe (writer): He helped me so much with the script of my novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. He showed me the documentaries he’d made, and at last I felt I was on the main line. He was in Nottingham making a documentary for the Central ...”

“... of class – Beryl Bainbridge’s benign Forever England follows up her television series. Alan Sillitoe has written a coffee-table book, Nottinghamshire, with photographs by David Sillitoe. And David Selbourne has put his New Society pieces together in Left Behind: Journeys into British Politics. Forever ...”

“... are sophisticated people. All the same, they may have trouble in explaining their way through Alan Sillitoe’s latest novel – if not because they find it mystifying, then because they find it (as it is) more complex than fiction is generally expected to be these days. It asks for the kind of academic explication which its hero would reject ...”

“... those who don’t already know, these biographical details all apply to the author of the novel, Alan Sillitoe. This is to be a candidly, if not straightforwardly autobiographical work. It is also the concluding volume in the series that began with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Arthur Seaton, the leading figure in that novel, has here only a ...”

“... number of familiar names on the contents page: Barbara Trapido, Anthony Thwaite, Anne Stevenson, Alan Brownjohn, Helen Simpson, Andrew Motion, Michael Hofmann, Alan Sillitoe, Louis de Bernières and Geoff Dyer are ten of them, and ‘new’ isn’t the first word that springs to mind. But there are plenty of good ...”

“... survey of post-war fiction. In the late Fifties and after, Kingsley Amis, Johns Wain and Braine, Alan Sillitoe and Co struck a new, demotic note. The ‘traditional’ English novel of good and bad manners was radicalised and updated. Karl Miller helped to institute a new criticism which seemed to owe more to a modest, clean, unadorned English than to ...”

“... for whom even Lucifer and all his angels must be made to perform on cue. What makes the novels of Alan Sillitoe infinitely superior to this kind of journeyman’s work, is the abiding sense that the strong narrative line, though traditionally conceived and carried through, is at the same time a vehicle for allegory or, if that is too strong a ...”

“... worried about a medical report which may prove him to be tubercular. The dust-cover biography of Alan Sillitoe suggests that the story may be partly autobiographical. The second section, a quarter of the length, gives us Paul Morton (in the third person, no longer narrating) in a boring motor car, following the same route, trying unsuccessfully to ...”

“... his wife, Bernard an ‘international bookdealer, salesman manager of the publishing world’, as Sillitoe not very intelligibly puts it. Jenny is his second wife, and he is always on the look-out for what he would call a nice little piece. All sorts of ironic possibilities seem open, but what happens is that both Bernard and George revert to their youthful ...”

“... by some recent critics – is answered almost too neatly by the first two novels under review. Alan Sillitoe’s Life goes on is a rampant adventure-tale of a male rogue, or rogue male, on the loose between two marriages. Mary Gordon’s Men and Angels shows a happily-married heroine struggling tenaciously, in her husband’s absence, to preserve her ...”

“... covered by this selection of his letters. (The earlier ones came out as In Broken Images in 1982.) Alan Bold’s index to the MacDiarmid volume has no entry for Graves, any more than Paul O’Prey’s has for MacDiarmid. The two poets, though contemporaries, might have been inhabiting different planets. And yet the impression one gets from the two books is not ...”

“... It was surprising to see the resemblances between Her Victory and This Earth of Mankind. Alan Sillitoe’s new novel is about 50-year-old Britons feeling rootless. Pramoedya Ananta Toer is concerned with young people of the Dutch East Indies in the 1890s, almost choked with different roots – religions, races, cultures, classes – all sprouting wildly ...”

“... one another at Oxford, but had little to do with autodidacts like Colin Wilson, John Osborne and Alan Sillitoe – this last name less often mentioned in this context than might have been expected, doubtless because Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) was published a little too late to be fitted into the fashionable grouping. Since the constituents ...”

“... a belching roar over a middle-aged man sitting with a woman on one of the green leather seats. Alan Sillitoe. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning ‘Belching roar’ is, I think, bloody good (you notice that Sillitoe is writing so plastered that it reads as if it’s the poor old temptation that fell down the ...”