He's trying to decide whether or not she's beautiful.

Daniel Deronda is at a gambling resort watching a young woman at the roulette table.The epigraph to the chapter tells us that there's no such thing as the beginning of a story, so we get the idea that, even though this is the beginning of the novel, other things have been going on.To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at. The 40th anniversary edition of Brother of the More Famous Jack is published by Bloomsbury (£8.99). Give me a Wave of Egg-Kings and The Industrial Revelation. Still the most perfect satire on that pompous view of English history espoused by our current PM. An excess of adjectives is never a good thing, but, ah! It’s a teasing, anarchic, dark, funny, convoluted, metaphysical wonder.ġ066 and All That by WC Sellar and RJ Yeatman. Top favourite is Fred Vargas This Night’s Foul Work, to name but one. I never read a detective story until I turned 70, but now they are my unwinding bedtime reads. I love all other George Eliot, but I not only find Daniel a moralising goody-goody, I can’t forgive him for turning against his mother to gang up with the male orthodoxy. Becky Sharp pitted against that cavalcade of entitled mediocrity!ĭaniel Deronda.

Reading it again, I found it breathtaking in its originality, its wit, its range, its sociopolitical grasp. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray – I couldn’t get on with an author who kept intruding to remind me that the characters were all his puppets. Is that why I jump straight into the dialogue and don’t waste time on the scenery?

Also that concise, energy-charged prose of Jane Austen. A book that possibly influenced me was Elaine Dundy’s 1958 novel The Dud Avocado. I became obsessed with tapping out the various rhythms of their speech. I “wrote” my first novel while accidentally rediscovering that form of playing that involves talking to pretend people. I never had a conscious ambition to be a writer. The book that made me want to be a writer Seven decades on, and we’re still behaving like Nazis to farm animals. As a schoolteacher in 1965, I read Ruth Harrison’s Animal Machines, which exposed the horrors of intensive farming.

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