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“... Some time late in 1939, around the time World War Two began, I met Rayner Heppenstall in the street, and we went to a pub, no doubt to exchange gloomy views about our likely futures. His first novel would be coming out soon. ‘It might sell a few copies in the rubber shops,’ he said. The book was The Blaze of Noon ...”

“... easy to reply: it all depends upon your personality, but that would be misleading. The reader of Rayner Heppenstall, for instance, is, I think, not in the least interested in his personality as such, but in how it translates itself into actions – very small daily actions. A writer like Heppenstall is not a ...”

“... Some twenty years ago, not long after I came to England, I heard a talk by Rayner Heppenstall asserting that English and French were the only two cultures which had a continuous literary tradition from medieval times. Sceptical as I was about his claim, even in the European context, I was taken aback by the lack of curiosity which it demonstrated ...”

“... play All That Fall. Equally important, and more autonomous, was ‘Features’. We learn that Rayner Heppenstall as a Features producer could call Angus Wilson, Henry Reed, Laurie Lee and Muriel Spark ‘exclusively mine’, and there were staff stars like Louis MacNeice and W.R. Rodgers (stars at the bar of the George as well as in Broadcasting ...”

“... Brigid Brophy, Anthony Burgess, Alan Burns, Angela Carter, Eva Figes, Giles Gordon, Wilson Harris, Rayner Heppenstall, even hasty, muddled Robert Nye, Ann Quin, Penelope Shuttle, Alan Sillitoe (for his last book only. Raw Material indeed), Stefan Themerson, and (coming) John Wheway (stand by): and if only Heathcote Williams would write a novel’. In 1968 ...”

“... Memories, take the form of anecdotes that might have been – a little dramatic sketch for Rayner Heppenstall and the Third Programme, for instance, which featured Henry James being driven in Turn of the Screw country in Edith Wharton’s car, and catching sight of the notice MOTORISTS! BEWARE OF THE CHILDREN. Nice to feel that a past could ...”

“... rock-bottom prices’. His translation is a welcome alternative to the cumbersome 1967 version by Rayner Heppenstall and Lindy Foord (the only other English Impressions are extracts, among them Ashbery’s fine 1962 translation of its first chapter). And he rightly points out that in this novel about European tourists stranded in Africa, Roussel ...”

“... not seize on is an odd line in a famous letter he quotes, written in 1943 by Orwell to his friend Rayner Heppenstall. Its significance only struck me when rereading it in the context of this book. In a splendid 1942 talk dug up by West, Orwell expatiates on austerity, sport and the British spirit, remarking: ‘For nearly two years no one has seen a ...”

“... Connolly, ‘aggressive’ Lewis, ‘perennially acerbic’ Douglas Cooper, ‘self-righteous’ Rayner Heppenstall, and so on. It was the need to make a living that pushed Read’s interests towards visual art. In 1919 he married Evelyn Roff, whom he had met when they were students at Leeds. Working first at the Ministry of Labour and then the ...”

“... and most have water and a little cultivable land, and goats will live on them. According to R.H. [Rayner Heppenstall], a woman who rented an island in the Hebrides in order to avoid air raids was the first air-raid casualty of the war, the RAF dropping a bomb there by mistake. Good if true. There are few personal revelations in these 20 volumes. We are ...”

“... in his life. We read of him lashing out at tiresome Burmese students with a heavy cane; attacking Rayner Heppenstall; killing an adder with sadistic deliberation. He once wrote of a wasp that was eating the jam on his plate. He cut it in half with his knife, and watched it continuing to eat jam, which squirted out of the back end: flying off, it had a ...”

“... set of strategies available to writers, even if it doesn’t formally go by that name. When Rayner Heppenstall published Four Absentees, his version of an autobiography, for instance, he chose not to recount his life directly but to project a diffused self-portrait onto four well-known cultural figures who had been his friends (Dylan Thomas, George ...”

“... that, in the early Sixties, Roussel was taken notice of for the first time in this country, when Rayner Heppenstall, together with his daughter, translated his major works into English and published a short study of him. That modest volume served Roussel’s cause far better than will the present translation of Foucault’s dispiritingly portentous ...”

“... Dillon, Cleverdon and Bridson, and new ones like W. R. Rodgers, Terence Tiller, R. D. Smith and Rayner Heppenstall. MacNeice was henceforth one of a group of literary men whose social life revolved around certain pubs in Soho, Fitzrovia or the immediate environs of Broadcasting House. Dylan Thomas was much in use as an actor and a voice as well as a ...”