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“... no known intellectual, religious or social pattern. An old friend and former schoolmaster, Mr Sayer seems to intuit the ‘highly unusual boy’ in Lewis, and this makes his biographical memoir both more perceptive and more congenial than the already numerous official and professional studies. Lewis lost his mother very young, always got on badly with his ...”

“... table, he would take it for granted that she merited nothing but a little badinage or banter.) George Sayer, in the course of a notably sympathetic and pleasing portrait, has to admit that Lewis did not naturally like boys or children at all, although he was a most successful writer of stories for them. But A. C. Harwood records that his children ...”

“... George Hayim, candid homosexual masochist, globe-scampering self-gratifier, unabashed lifelong idler, one-book novelist, offers, for what it’s worth, his life story. Born in 1920, the son of an adulterous, wealthy Shanghai stockbroker whom he hated, and a Shanghai mother whom he adored, Hayim recalls an incident in his childhood when his father punished him for swearing by sticking a pin in his lip ...”

“... are the relevant facts: this rubbish heap of details is the past, the London under London. Paul Sayer works as a staff nurse in a psychiatric hospital. The Comforts of Madness is an extended imaginary exposure to what the wretches under his care feel. Peter is a long-term catatonic patient, and the novel takes the form of his interior monologue. Seemingly ...”

“... winds up with a postscript set in Norwich. At a staid University Teachers of English get-together George Steiner, Frank Kermode and Seamus Heaney do their party pieces and a novelist – the author of Doctor Criminale, we must suppose – reads from his upcoming work, ‘whose ending he seems not to know’. The publisher’s blurb laconically informs us that ...”

“... relation to television and press: far from being, like the old Hollywood Hays office, a mere nay-sayer, the state is a co-producer of images. Working creatively with the fourth branch of American government, the media, it aims – for the mass public at home, not those on the contested foreign ground – to substitute for war the image of war. That ...”

“... with lower-case letters at the beginning of lines, might have been no more than what Stefan George, who employed such devices wholesale, was later to call barbed wire against the uninitiated (‘Stacheldraht wider Unberufene’). But the archaic language had the more destructively alienating effect of sounding poetic while concealing meaning ...”