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“... taste of ecstatic sex, and it goes to her head. She proceeds to marry him. Since the mid-Fifties, Ruth PrawerJhabvala has been scrutinising such inter-racial marriages, as well as examining the importation into India of European attitudes, and vice versa; her earliest novels were domestic comedies set in Delhi, among ...”

“... the crackdown, Orwell’s consigning Boxer to the knacker’s yard seems a more plausible outcome. Ruth PrawerJhabvala is a very different Pole. In 1975, with the Booker Prize awarded (to the accompaniment of some chauvinistic protest), it was commonplace to rank her with Conrad. The follow-up to Heat and Dust has been ...”

“... odd pieces of narrative embroidery? Such questions may help to explain the unsatisfactoriness of Ruth PrawerJhabvala’s recent novels. Or simpler explanations may be more pertinent: waning energy, for example, and the loss, or abandonment, of her real – her serious ...”

“... The poet is not a poet in Ruth PrawerJhabvala’s new novel, and the dancer is not a dancer. ‘Although her movements were always the same – she waved her arms above her head, she ran now to the right of the room, now to the left – her audience obligingly saw what she wanted them to see ...”

“... Baedeker’s Italy, Baedeker’s France. In a sense, all Desai’s novels are Baedekers. With Ruth PrawerJhabvala, she is the best of guides to what it’s like to be Indian, and maybe that is because she is half-German – Prawer Jhabvala is Indian only by marriage, and ...”

“... in the list – perhaps there’s a nostalgia for the old Empire (Scott, J.G. Farrell, Ruth PrawerJhabvala, plus Nadine Gordimer, Naipaul, and P.H. Newby on Suez). Negatively, you won’t expect, and won’t find, anything that looks very ‘experimental’. Muriel Spark must have come up again and ...”

“... are people, from Aalto to Zuckermann, taking in Fidel Castro, Elizabeth David, Erskine Childers, Ruth PrawerJhabvala, Robert Byron, Lawrence Durrell, Le Corbusier, Malcolm MacDonald, Tambimuttu ... and Donald Maclean. It is completely typical of the whole book that Maclean (whom he knew at school at Gresham’s) is ...”

“... and Colonial College in London. What followed after her arrival in India reads like the plot of a Ruth PrawerJhabvala novel. Finding it easy to dislike the memsahibs and missionaries she met in Calcutta, Ackroyd unexpectedly found it easy to dislike the Indians too. Acquiring premises for her school proved laborious ...”

“... reproaches is embarrassing. She is a wonderfully clear-sighted writer, innately courteous, like Ruth PrawerJhabvala or E.M. Forster, to the creatures of her imagination. It is foolhardy of her, though, to take on Kafka, whose work remains a set text for any examination on the 20th century. Both Robert Plunket and ...”

“... affinity with the blood brotherhood’ of the thugs. While Merchant’s sometime collaborators (Ruth PrawerJhabvala as well as James Ivory) seem to have winced when faced with the chief plot premise – that an upper-class Englishman could effortlessly pass himself off as a lower-class Indian – Merchant himself ...”

“... MacArthur’s senior citizens. William Gaddis (1982) was awarded a fellowship at the age of 60, Ruth PrawerJhabvala (1984) at 57, Susan Sontag (1990) at 59, Ernest J. Gaines (1993) at 60. Thomas Pynchon was a relatively young 51 when he won, but by 1988 already the author of his major works. The Foundation ...”

“... the Sotheby’s auction – Jane Austen in Manhattan, directed by James Ivory and scripted by Ruth PrawerJhabvala. Jane Austen’s contribution to the film was admittedly slight to begin with, and became wholly submerged, in what turned out to be a subtle, ambivalent study of two rival producers of the play, with ...”