"It is difficult within the limits of a necessarily brief review to do justice to the art of so powerful and original a writer as Mr William Sansom. No one acquainted with his work can doubt that in him we have one of the most gifted, if not the most gifted, of younger writers of the short story."

"Mr Sansom is the most spirited writer of his generation who has so far appeared."

London Times

"His observation, wit and use of words are fresh, exciting and beautiful."

London Daily

"Mr Sansom's descriptions are extraordinary. He is the only English writer who sees the physical world in a new way…his descriptive power, together with his dialogues and his original social analysis, have entirely rescued the lower middle-class world from the rough writers and the reporters."

"He makes you see, hear, taste, touch and smell to his order…Mr Sansom's descriptive power is steady fireworks."

The Saturday Review of Books

"A superb literary entertainer."

Time Magazine

"A writer of extraordinary sensibility, with a remarkable gift for description through suggestion and with a poet's intensity of vision."

New York Herald Tribune

"One of the modern masters of English prose"

"Unsurpassed for the precision with which he analyzes character or motive."

New York Times Book Review

"A man with superb control of his material and with a language and style that is simplicity itself."

The Atlantic

"You may be quite sure, I think, that Mr Sansom will be heard from again, and importantly so."

San Francisco Chronicle

"An artist."

Baltimore Sun

"As his magnificent control of the English sentence and his unflagging examination of the moral and aesthetic meaning of his subject matter demonstrate, Sansom stems from the great nineteenth-century tradition of English fiction."

The Nation

"A man with a natural eye for the romance of foreign parts…a clutch of coloured postcards crammed with every conceivable impression."

The London Times

"To read him is like wearing glasses after having long suffered unaware from myopia; the everyday world is revealed in almost frightening brilliance and sharpness through the mind of a self-tortured human being."

Penguin Books

"An original, powerful writer."

Virginia Kirkus Bulletin