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“... case, it also gives a preliminary hint as to the scale of the task that the novelist has taken on. Jennifer Johnston has to provide sufficient information, directly or indirectly, to make accessible a locality, a period, and a political situation that many of her readers might take to be remote. She is also concerned – this does not emerge in the ...”

“... called for. Scruton and Wilson are teachers at the University of London and occasional novelists. Jennifer Johnston is a full-time professional who has won, or come close to winning, her profession’s highest prizes (though not the mass readership that sometimes goes with them). The Invisible Worm is a skilled exercise in narrative economy. It must be ...”

“... the scene of a repressive childhood, somewhere to escape from. But this is incidental: it is not Jennifer Johnston’s theme. Her theme is a daunting one, from which it is hard to preserve a decent detachment, and it makes claims that by most readers will only grudgingly be acknowledged. Constance Keating, a woman of 40, finds she is dying of ...”

“... on the loose, and Republicans in trench coats resorting to extreme expedients. Fool’s Sanctuary, Jennifer Johnston’s new novel, or novella, rehearses these familiar elements, but imposes a new, somewhat wavering outline on them, as they float into the mind of an old woman savouring for the last time the poignancy of her past. Like Minnie McMahon in ...”

“... best names – hard to beat Dirty Den. Brookside had scowling authenticity and the acting of Sue Johnston. Corrie had pretty much everything. The parade of glowering, glittering females. The insouciant snap. Deirdre’s mother, Blanche (who walked out with a funeral director played by the comedian Roy Hudd), was a marvellous gloombag. Standing beside a ...”

“... Edmonds), passage rites (Sarah Hitch), household cults (Matthew Dillon) and magic (Sarah Iles Johnston). There are also signs of frustration with the old idea that ancient religions consisted solely of ritual acts and lacked any reflective dimension. Like many caricatures of the pre-Christian world, this misapprehension was rooted in a schematic ...”

“... opens with the potent introitus of take-off and closes with an amen descending into landing.’ Jennifer Croft​ ’s translation is exceptionally adventurous, as that passage shows, even if there are occasional awkwardnesses of word order and clashes of register. (To say, of Peter the First’s interest in anatomical specimens, that the tsar ‘got ...”

“... here and there one can find contemporary poets tending the Duncan flame (Nathanial Mackey, Devin Johnston and Jennifer Moxley are three of them), theirs is a slender coterie. Jarnot begins her book with the warning that she has ‘refrained from deeper interpretations of the work in my interest to shape the book as ...”