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“... under review, in being written by an author susceptible to the glamour in ill-fated associations. Barbara Vine, Ruth Rendell’s alter ego, has written her second enthralling novel: A Fatal Inversion is about the fatal convergence of some more or less unlikeable young people, during the sweltering summer of 1976. The novel opens, in the present, with an ...”

“... of a shocking history. Murderous violence has been half-normalised in The House of Stairs by Barbara Vine (the pseudonym of the crime writer Ruth Rendell), whose narrator Elizabeth Vetch has in the 1980s to deal with a friend, Bell Sanger, who has served a ‘life sentence’ for a late Sixties murder and come out again. Murderers used to be ...”

“... private life only goes to show, he’s not an involving man. The novels she writes under the name Barbara Vine seem to be Ruth Rendell’s out-patient department, and certainly in Gallow-glass little Joe – as his enigmatic friend Sandor calls him – looks like a deserving candidate for community care. Illegitimate and unlovingly fostered, he doesn’t ...”

“... This is a splendid opening for a detective novel. Ruth Rendell likewise, under her new name of Barbara Vine, kicks off in striking style: ‘On the morning Vera died I woke up very early.’ Vera Hillyard, we learn within a line or two, is scheduled to die by hanging at the usual hour of eight in the morning. It is Vera’s niece Faith Longley, ...”

“... novel this year: the other, Gallowglass, was published in February under the pseudonym Barbara Vine. (I had thought that Ruth Rendell used that name for her in-the-mind-of-a-psycho novels, in which case it could very appositely have been used for her new book. As a reader and fan of Vine/Rendell, I have to ...”

“... of copyists and pale cousins like the vaguely mischievous Fay Weldon, the clodhopping misanthropic Barbara Vine, to understand that Spark’s use of that gorgeously ‘cemp’ posh-Scottish written voice of hers is really special. Not to mention a host of younger would-be poseuses and charmers who manage the nastiness and the affectation no problem, but ...”

“... both outlying members of the same sprawling Midwestern family: Saad is married to my first cousin Barbara. His name is much in the news and on the op-ed pages these days, if you’re looking out for it. A year ago, the New York Times Magazine ran a photo of Saad on its cover, in which he is seen peering from between his courtroom cage-bars. But even such ...”

“... is bound in the Coptic style, using a chainstitch method, while its binding design incorporates a vine and chalice motif found in Eastern Mediterranean art – a similar design appears on the fifth or sixth-century doors of the church of Sitt Barbara in Cairo. In stitches, spaces and leather tooling, the Cuthbert Gospel ...”

“... Hot Gossip ought not to cavort in Nazi gear. I read him, too, for his lovable obsessions – with Barbara Woodhouse, with Sue-Ellen’s mouth, with David Vine, and with all things Japanese – and for his willingness to admit that vulgar stuff is best watched fairly vulgarly: ‘You would have to be dead not to be thrilled ...”

“... the survivors, had prepared me for this. In Corso’s hutch, his minders begged for copies of Barbara Pym, while Gregory spoke wistfully of Philip Larkin. Denton Welch was William Burroughs’s main intellectual squeeze. Ferlinghetti had high hopes for Jeremy Reed. The Beats were now heritage fodder, a potential Bloomsbury group. There was even talk of ...”