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“... In No Boys Play Here, which forms a diptych with Girl with Dove, her unsparing memoir of 2018, Sally Bayley is concerned with ‘boys trying to become men, but also girls playing at being boys’. Dads, uncles, brothers, neighbours – figures of menace and disaster – loom and vanish (‘when I look for the men they are never there’). When they do ...”

“... Leintwardine’s early feminist realist novel I stopped at a chemist, later made into a film as Sally goes shopping. But Beals’s wish to identify figures in the present with more fabulous archetypes in the past, like Henchman’s instinct for meaning in ‘the curious synchronisms and juxtapositions, physical and moral, in which we all from time to time ...”

“... reacting against. It was against characters in books, which formed a convenient target and Aunt Sally, disguising the fact that what she really repudiated was the imaginative and introspective organisation which produced the character as a work of art. ‘If they didn’t feel a thing why did they go and pretend to?’ asks Rachel in The Voyage Out. Her ...”

“... with impunity to give away the endings of whodunnits. We are told on page 248 who strangled Sally in James’s Cover Her Face (it wasn’t, of course, the loyal housekeeper), and a page later Priestman coolly lets the murderer of A Certain Justice out of the bag. If this kind of thing catches on, one can imagine the Crime Writers Guild threatening to ...”

“... master of ceremonies, unwilling or unable to prevent himself interrupting the proceedings. As John Bayley put it a few years back, one primary object of a Barnes novel ‘is to dazzle and bemuse the reader throughout with the knowledge and reminder that this is a very clever young person writing a very clever and witty novel’. The most obvious manifestation ...”