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“... book about yobbery. The funny, sad, truth-telling Fever Pitch is not that kind of book.* Nick Hornby takes his cue from a fact well-known to football fans themselves: that the deepest current of feeling shared by football supporters everywhere is not so much anger (noisy and visible though that is) as a peculiar kind of sadness – a melancholy ...”

“... me.’ Unless you’re a cold-hearted beast, you will. But in the morning you’ll regret it. Nick Hornby is a former teacher, as the title of his new novel might suggest. Like Parsons he is capable of great emotional directness. The narrator of the new novel thinks about her poor suffering brother: We could go home to Mum and Dad’s. We’d both ...”

“... since I was a grown-up, responded to a piece of writing so immediately either. How successful is Hornby in his construction of the character Rob? Very: I don’t go for him myself, but I’d probably approve if any of my friends wanted to go out with him, so long as he’d sorted out his unfinished business first. Does Laura’s feminine perspective make for ...”

“... novelists (see The Ladies Lindores). These are two of ‘my people’, in the sense that Nick Hornby uses the phrase, meaning those figures ‘I have thought about a lot, over the years … who have shaped me, inspired me, made me think about my own work’. Hornby’s list is erratic, as anyone’s would ...”

“... problem with this dual strike-force, but happily the author – David Bennie – does not say so. Nick Hornby cannot be blamed for writing of this kind, although Fever Pitch has helped to set the tone. In some ways, Hornby has links with the old school. He knows and cares that there is something ‘moronic’ about his ...”

“... she died). Barber had dropped out of education and considered herself engaged when ‘in the nick of time’ she discovered that he was a con man, a thief, a racketeer – in the employ of Peter Rachman, none other – and already married with children. I learned not to trust people; I learned not to believe what they say but to watch what they do; I ...”

“... until 2020. In the early 1990s, three crucial footballing events occurred: Gazza cried in Turin, Nick Hornby published Fever Pitch, and the Premier League was born. Before the 1992 election, it seemed like everything was about to change for the better. Neil Kinnock would be prime minister and football would reclaim its place at the centre of national ...”

“... indeed a night of shame. ‘For alarmingly large chunks of an average day, I am a moron,’ wrote Nick Hornby in his excellent Fever Pitch last year. The people who run football, run TV, know that most fans are moronic, that they will put up with just about anything that’s thrown at them provided that they are allowed to keep their fantasies ...”

“... in the novel offers to redeem that everyday catastrophe. Tyler’s work has been championed by Nick Hornby and Roddy Doyle, among others, as part of a case for the deep seriousness of domestic-realist novels, which are, it’s argued, sneerily sidelined as ‘middlebrow’ by a cultural establishment that values experimentation and philosophising ...”

“... you have to like it: if Home wanted his work to be likeable, he could just set about copying Nick Hornby, same as everybody else. But Home is using writing for a different purpose. Writing is power, ideology, an instrument of domination; it’s a huge, filthy, stinking machine. Yes, it’s possible – and can be rewarding in all sorts of ways ...”

“... a history of spa-going? Or Amazing Grace, a cool look at dukes? Before there was Dava Sobel, or Nick Hornby, or Fermat’s Last Theorem or Andy McNab, there was Mr Turner, and his series of second-hand typewriters. ‘I remember a van arriving out of the blue with a fine stock of near-prehistoric machines,’ he says. ‘My father very decently bought ...”

“... petered out, to be replaced by something more resigned. Dyer, perhaps, is a bit like Nick Hornby, singing for his supper, a bit too eager to be liked: Thomas Bernhard For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It; virtually fat-free modernist romances designed to fit the side-pockets of rich students’ gap-year rucksacks, in need of reading ...”

“... the hipper glossies. On the back of more heavily puffed recyclings by other NME veterans such as Nick Kent and Julie Burchill, that brief pre-Thatcher Waterloo sunset in the IPC tower has taken on a rosy apocalyptic glow. These are not the uncorseted, feelgood ramblings of Sixties survivors (Howard Marks, Richard Neville et al), but the ...”

“... reported on the Oscars without mentioning any actors’ names.) All the pop stuff smacks a bit of Nick Hornby, if not Forrest Gump. But then again the modernists had no aversion to pop culture ephemera. As Hugh Kenner showed in A Sinking Island, we might not have had Ulysses without Tit-Bits. The internet turns out to be Natalie’s undoing. She takes to ...”

“... running, or played some favourite music, loud. They might find an ex to have sudden sex with, as Nick Hornby had his hero do in High Fidelity. Different people relieve the closed-in misery of family and bereavement in different ways. On the other hand, there are literary traditions that make much of the visual and functional closeness of clothing and ...”