Patrick Skene Catling
Closing Time at the Bar
As the 84-year-old widow of a QC, and with an OBE for services to literature, Jane Gardam is an expert on achievement, old age, bereavement, and rivalry in the legal profession, and she empathises vividly with her fictional characters in comparable circumstances. A consummate storyteller, she writes of life with wonderful gusto and wry humour, and of death with a poignance entirely uncloyed by mawkishness.
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'Amis clearly belongs to the do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do school of pedagogy. More or less everything he says is demonstrably contradicted by elements of his own work, be they here or elsewhere.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/never-without-a-hitch
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https://literaryreview.co.uk/master-of-the-universe-3
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@laurenohagan91 on the Edwardian bookplate fashion.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/stepping-up-to-the-bookplate