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“... of them describes as ‘Britain’s first urban guerrilla group’. Originally published in 1975, Gordon Carr’s book is a big-format, bite-sized narrative of the Brigade and the trials of its alleged members, supplemented by a selective chronology of the ‘angry decade’ of 1965-75. Its protagonists are a group of young student militants, inspired by ...”

“... however, Hornby’s distinctive voice proves impossible to disguise: How to Be Good’s Katie Carr is About a Boy’s Will Freeman is the High Fidelity Rob is the same autobiographical voice familiar to readers of Fever Pitch. Fortunately, it is a voice of apparently inexhaustible and androgynous charm. Hornby was never really writing Lad Lit, which if it ...”

“... existed. This world was Q’s cave: a warm, amateurish, freshly-dug hideout in which, say, G.S. Gordon, when he succeeded Walter Raleigh as Merton Professor of English at Oxford, ‘was said to have got the job largely on the strength of his Lit Supp contributions’. In that first year of the TLS’s existence, The Wings of the Dove was reviewed by ...”

“... his writing self. One notes, in support of this, the prominence in the novels of heroes like Gordon Comstock who break with their stultifying families. And it is interesting, in the light of the works reviewed here, that Patricia Highsmith also seems to have been one of those who felt the need to rename herself before going on to make a name for herself ...”

“... Byatt. Another novelist whose protagonists are more or less passive and defeated is George Orwell. Gordon Comstock and Winston Smith are no heroes, as their names indicate. But Orwell himself – also a created character in various ways – was a redoubtable hero. In both A Vain Conceit and After the War Taylor invokes him as a tutelary deity: in the later ...”

“... with teachers who made him think critically about facts and sources. He was inspired by E.H. Carr; he learned that Hizb ut-Tahrir had taken many of its ideas from Rousseau and Gramsci. At the same time, he began attending Islamic study groups that focused on spirituality rather than politics. He heard a Muslim scholar reprimand those ‘who adopted ...”

“... to Suffolk to live on as a clergyman’s daughter, despite her loss of faith. The failed poet Gordon Comstock in Keep the Aspidistra Flying also cuts himself off from his family and everyone who’s close to him, but nonetheless ends up getting his girl pregnant, marrying her, and acquiring both an aspidistra and a job.Orwell later wanted to suppress A ...”