"Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty."

"..the longer I am here Laren, the more beautiful it becomes for me and now that I feel myself more comfortable, I can judge it better.. .It is touching beautiful here , with a delicacy of lines and lo…"

"The mania for self-observation and self-admiration in literature and the view that a work is the more true and the more convincing, the more directly the author reveals himself in it, are part of the …"

"People say we ought not to allow ourselves to be drawn into a theoretical antagonism between Nazidom and democracy; but the antagonism is here now. It is this very conflict of spiritual and moral idea…"

"Now, The Archers is not a programme I’m hugely familiar with, because every time the theme music comes on, I leap across the kitchen with an athleticism I don’t actually possess, in search of the “fuc…"