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“... and so on. Some of these postcards could be used, in a similar way, to illustrate stories by V.S. Pritchett. In the section ‘Workers: The Office’ there is a card in which the foreground is dominated by an open ledger, inkwells, a paste pot, a desk calendar and piles of papers. Beyond, young men turn from their places at long tables to look at the ...”

“... whose outcomes we find satisfying. For the greater part of his very long adult life, Victor Sawdon Pritchett seems to have been a happy man. Pritchett’s son, Oliver, later recalled that he and his sister grew up ‘in a word factory’. ‘The handwritten pages, covered in revisions, crossings out, second and third ...”

“... of a cultural unreadiness, or inability, to accommodate those compulsive artists who are, as V.S. Pritchett wrote of Dickens’s characters, ‘solitaries … caught living in a world of their own’, whose inner life is ‘hanging out, so to speak, on their tongues’.Hornby doesn’t reflect on the ways in which his attachment has changed since 2016, but it ...”

“... freshness or the capacity to surprise one by new perceptions that characterise the work of V.S. Pritchett in the generation that came after his. His success was due in part to his power to charm away the criticism even of a Virginia Woolf, but more positively because he was reassuringly literate and not too egotistical. He was therefore acceptable to a ...”

“... capable of writing ‘the admirable Admiral Croft’ and ‘a revolting revolutionary act’. V.S. Pritchett, for whom Amis has a well-considered and affectionate admiration (expressed with less qualification in an earlier essay), doesn’t understand the elements of punctuation, his being ‘tangled, hectic and Victorian’. Moreover he commits sentences here ...”

“... chocs. Iris Murdoch, white-faced, bluff, confident, sometimes turned up and nibbled. V.S. Pritchett was usually a guest with his wife, Dorothy, a laughing teasing couple. ‘That’s very Irish,’ Pritchett murmured of Murdoch’s wearing a shabby mackintosh throughout one evening. There was Brigid Brophy and her ...”

“... making her own fictional characters as unfree as pampered convicts. Perhaps in our time only V.S. Pritchett has written the fiction his criticism desires. A list of the weaknesses of English fiction since, say, Henry Green would go like this: it has produced few characters of depth or life (only Mr Biswas, Jean Brodie and John Self in almost forty years); it ...”

“... a fair account of the book, yet is a well-composed piece in its own right. Raban’s model is V.S. Pritchett, certainly the master of the 1500-word review. As Raban noticed in the New Statesman office, ‘there was no mistaking a manuscript by Pritchett – it was overlaid with small embellishments in longhand, many of them ...”

“... a dozen short stories by the contemporary doyen of the genre. The economy and serenity of V.S. Pritchett’s technique is as great as ever, as is the hospitality shown in his choice of subjects. A hairdresser on holiday runs into a tiresome London neighbour, a widower and retired carpet salesman looks up his old secretary with matrimony in view, an elderly ...”

“... up, through the trees . . . I’d learned to cook. Discovered, in fact, a bit of a flair.’ V.S. Pritchett, whose music can be heard in Swift’s novel (Pritchett, like Swift, was very fond of that shy petty-bourgeois English apology, ‘a bit of a’), never kept up this kind of voice for longer than a novella. And even ...”

“... reasons for admiring it. In this country Ford has enjoyed the advocacy of Graham Greene and V.S. Pritchett, but the busiest and also the most effective of Ford’s admirers have been American. Though Carcanet have done well over here, and items like the latest issue of Agenda testify to continuing English interest,* the republication of Ford’s books has ...”

“... The Speakers attracted the admiration of Harold Pinter, William Burroughs, Anthony Burgess, V.S. Pritchett and more, he has gradually achieved the status of super-wizard in a community of nomads, pilgrims and seekers after truth. For two years he successfully ran the Ruff, Tuff, Cream Puff Estate Agency (founded by Wat Tyler in 1381) which advised the ...”

“... Hugh Thomas and attended by writers he thought she might admire (Larkin, Isaiah Berlin, V.S. Pritchett, Mario Vargas Llosa and Anthony Powell, among others), which Larkin had found tough going. ‘The Thatcher dinner was pretty grisly. Even now I shudder and moan involuntarily. M says: “Is it death again, or Mrs Thatcher?”’ At the start of the ...”

“... when she’s writing, chooses to make do with a ‘compact top-floor pied-à-terre’. V.S. Pritchett is encountered in ‘a handsome terrace to the north of Regent’s Park’, and Emma Tennant in ‘a comfortably and attractively bruised Victorian house off Ladbroke Grove’. Russell Hoban’s ‘terraced house’ is also ‘comfortable’ but it ...”

“... with him and discussions in which he took part. There is one dating from 1941 between Moore, V.S. Pritchett, Sutherland and Clark about ‘Art and Life’. Pritchett starts one hare. ‘I think, Moore, some of your work looks to the average man, I should say, fairly remote from human experience.’ Moore replies that the ...”