After my first reading (thirty-five years after publication) of Penelope Fitzgerald’s much lauded 1979 Booker Prize novel, Offshore, I was left wondering what all the fuss was about. The work received wide acclaim, albeit from reviewers, but little academic interest....
Author of Deaf Sentence, David Lodge, admits in the book’s preamble that 60-something protagonist Desmond Bates is loosely based on himself. To what extent we shall never know although both are retired academics and both suffer from progressive hearing loss. The...
TS Eliot, in After Strange Gods, said of Thomas Hardy: ‘[He] seems to me to have written as nearly for the sake of “self-expression” as a man well can; and the self which he had to express does not strike me as a particularly wholesome or edifying matter of...