Paul Bailey
Contrived Excesses
The Mangan Inheritance
By Brian Moore
Cape 352pp £5.50 order from our bookshop
Miss Herbert (The Suburban Wife)
By Christina Stead
Virago 320pp £5.95 order from our bookshop
Brian Moore is among the least predictable of living novelists. Each book he writes, whatever its merits, is totally unexpected and completely different from its predecessors. He enjoys changing course. He has many stories to tell, and he tells them in a variety of ways. Not for him the annual rehash of a trusted and familiar plot; not for him the same few characters going through their customary paces.
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'Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, once asked Isaiah Berlin who his ideal dinner guest would be. Without hesitation Berlin exclaimed, ‘William James!’'
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