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“... John Murray’s fiction has always seemed to arise directly from the circumstances of his own life. At first, his work concentrated on his childhood and adolescence among the tiny, depressed communities that straggle along the English side of the Solway Firth. He then broke with his working-class background and read Sanskrit and Avestan at Oxford, later studying classical Indian medicine ...”

“... Beckett our contemporary – readers and audiences undoubtedly respond to him as a contemporary – is all the same very much a creature of the Twenties. He is the last great Modernist. His plays make use of Twenties techniques: hypnotic spotlights, loudspeakers, expressionistic props and highly-organised speech rhythms. Ill seen ill said is bafflingly obscure, not in any new and unfamiliar way, but in the now historic Modernist manner that uses metaphor and symbolism to half-suggest a meaning ...”

“... salesman during the 1970s and 1980s. My Ground, the last novel in the series, tells the story of Laurel Bell, a middle-aged housecleaner with a history of mental breakdowns. Each is driven by the personality of its central character. In Gas Station, the teenage narrator discovers Hendrix while the older workers still listen to doo-wop and Vietnam hovers just ...”