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“... pleasure, afterwards taking a bath and sitting on the sofa in a mood of relaxed satisfaction. Angus Wilson had some interesting things to say about the story in his book The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling. But he did not mention its crucial point: did these events really happen, or was the climactic one a self-induced fantasy, something that took ...”

“... At a party given forty-odd years ago by the suddenly-famous Angus Wilson, Dwight Macdonald ‘introduced himself, American-style, to Rose Macaulay, describing himself as an editor of the Partisan Review and founder of his own journal Politics: she stared at him and said, “Have you come all the way across the room to tell me that? How kind ...”

“... Big guns (J. B. Priestley, G. Wilson Knight, George Steiner, Angus Wilson) have been booming the name of John Cowper Powys for many years, outraged that other big guns will not join the salute. In the first number of the Powys Review, in 1977, George Steiner blamed Dr Leavis for praising Theodore Francis Powys above John Cowper, thus denying J ...”

“... in its own way.’ The second part, at least, of Tolstoy’s celebrated dictum is borne out by Angus Wilson’s fiction, which deals largely in families, and this with a rich diversity through a long series of books. Sir Angus shuffles the cards brilliantly, but Unhappy Families remains the name of the pack. There ...”

“... the book do more harm than it has to. This is a painful matter, especially for anyone who admires Angus Wilson’s novels very much, and who believes that it is with the best of intentions that he plotted and plaited what turns out to be a nouement. But the road to this particular Hell Fire Club is paved with good intentions, and the primrose path is ...”

“... As Penguin rescues the novels of Angus Wilson from out-of-print obscurity, here is an excuse to recall the argument of his most important work of literary criticism, the essay ‘Evil in the English Novel’. ‘For some time,’ he wrote in the Listener back in 1962, ‘I have been concerned about what is happening to the contemporary English novel ...”

“... by his sister’s reminiscences. Most of the previous biographers – Hilton Brown (1945), Sir Angus Wilson (1977), Lord Birkenhead (1978) – have accepted the Kiplings’ version as literally true. Certainly no one, not even Charles Carrington, who takes a less literal view in his official biography (1955), has ever seriously maintained that Kipling ...”

“... children, has been singled out for praise by critics as diverse as Philip Toynbee, Francis King, Angus Wilson and Andrew Sinclair. All feel that he lacks the large audience he deserves. Yet the curious reader, anxious to gain more information about this somewhat enigmatic writer, of undoubted power (and above all vision), may easily find himself ...”

“... autonomous, was ‘Features’. We learn that Rayner Heppenstall as a Features producer could call Angus Wilson, Henry Reed, Laurie Lee and Muriel Spark ‘exclusively mine’, and there were staff stars like Louis MacNeice and W.R. Rodgers (stars at the bar of the George as well as in Broadcasting House). It was in some ways a clique, but a distinguished ...”

“... except as subordinates and bed fellows. Some scenes, some dialogue, remind one of the early Angus Wilson. Others recall Anthony Powell’s Poussin-dominated series of novels and also, at moments, that writer’s earlier work. Yet Banville’s own style is distinctive, especially at those epiphanic time-stopped moments (there is a cluster of them in ...”

“... they most obviously lack in practice. They people their artistic gaps with desiderata. Thus Angus Wilson possessed a serious liberal politics, and an ethical respect for the individual, which illuminates his criticism of the novel; but he never created a single character of free and serious depth (he got closest in Late Call). A.S. Byatt has ...”

“... and middle-aged, middle-class anxieties with the nine stories in Georgina Hammick’s Spoilt. Angus Wilson’s name has been mentioned in comparison, but these pieces have none of the acidity and satiric hardness of Wilson’s early short stories. Their sheen, style and deliberate under-statement are much nearer ...”

“... White is the most ordinary and engaging little man in the world ... Charlie Wilson, the sort of father you see by the hundred in France on Sunday outings ... [Gordon] Goody, nerves of steel and the wolfish handsomeness of the pack leader ... The events were so vividly in the minds of the actors that they remember, like Henry V at ...”

“... Memoirs of the British Museum and its Music Room’ (King has some sharp things to say about Angus Wilson – or ‘Angus Frank Johnstone-Wilson’ as his early colleagues remember him). What comes across most strongly from the volume is the institution’s ability to endure. It ...”

“... it communicates a sense of exciting heterogeneity. Older readers may turn to the end item, by Angus Wilson, anticipating a return to the form in which he first excelled. But ‘Sri Lankan Journal’ is thin stuff. Never having kept a journal before, he tells us, Wilson decided to do so during the travelling that ...”