Praise for Julian Maclaren-Ross
'It was a great treat to discover the writing of Julian Maclaren-Ross. Witty, smart, eccentric - he never ceases to entertain.' (Sarah Waters)
'One of our very best writers…' (John Betjeman)
'Mr Maclaren-Ross's work... shows accomplishment of a rare kind.' (Evelyn Waugh)
'Maclaren-Ross is a writer due for the front rank… Better, and more dire, pictures of the Bohemian extremity in pubs and the Soho purlieus, in dun-beleaguered bungalows along half-made roads, in and out of bookshops and under the duress of the army are not, I should imagine, to be found. There is an at once savage and fatalistic tolerance in Mr Maclaren-Ross’s approach to human beings: he has also often the merit of being extremely funny.” (Elizabeth Bowen)
'An author of outstanding gifts…' (John Lehman)
'He has a talent of a rare and original kind…' (Olivia Manning)
'One of the very best writers of [the twentieth] century…' (Virginia Ironside)
'Nothing has given me greater pleasure than the continuing revival of one of my favourite writers, Julian Maclaren-Ross.' (Philip French, The Observer, Books of the Year, 2004)
'…a dazzling, talented writer, effortlessly funny and natural [with] …enormous gifts.' (Philip Hensher, The Spectator)
An author of 'joyous books filled with snappy comic writing and waspish dialogue.' (Hephzibah Anderson, BBC website, culture section)
Praise for Maclaren-Ross’s Collected Memoirs
'Those who have yet to discover this wonderfully stylish and sardonic writer should start here.' (Peter Parker, The Daily Telegraph)
'Bringing so many of [these memoirs] together in one volume offers a substantial account of his great talent…” (The Independent on Sunday)
'The Collected Memoirs are dazzling – the work of a prolific writer of great wit, erudition and insight.' (The Observer)
‘He wrote with an economy and a formal elegance that marvellously suited his detached attitude to whatever in his surroundings seemed odd, ridiculous or wild; down it all went in curt graphic dialogue and deadpan description. There is nothing else that more conveys the atmosphere of bohemian and fringe-literary London under the impact of war and its immediate hangover. The book [Memoirs of the Forties, which forms part of the Collected Memoirs,] is comic, nostalgic and at times even tragic.’ (V.S. Pritchett)
Praise for Maclaren-Ross's Of Love and Hunger
'I regard it as one of the few modern novels at the top of the first class.' (John Betjeman)
'[Of Love and Hunger shows that] Maclaren-Ross is one of the great unsung heroes of the literary 1940s and at his best a figure to rank with Orwell, Connolly and Waugh.' (D.J. Taylor)
'Funny, unsentimental and narrated in laconic, demotic prose, Of Love and Hunger is one of the most evocative works of the Depression era.' (Peter Parker, The Daily Telegraph)
Praise for Maclaren-Ross's Selected Stories
'Along with Waugh's [Sword of Honour] trilogy, his stories are the best and most accurate rendering of the military existence of the day…' (Walter Allen, The Sunday Times)
'He presents the military-medical bureaucracy as something out of Kafka rewritten by the Marx Brothers.' (Bernard Bergonzi, War and Its Aftermath)
'…the stories are vividly told in a manner that brings Maclaren-Ross’s various worlds alive for us more than half a century on.”' (Nicholas Royle, The Guardian)
'…very good indeed.' (The Daily Telegraph)
Praise for Maclaren-Ross's Selected Letters
'A neglected giant of postwar literary journalism comes alive in this correspondence…' (The Observer)
'Far more so than many of the Attlee-era scamps and hangers-on with whom he is occasionally compared, Maclaren-Ross is literature’s solitary, embattled conscience, the man for whom the compulsion to put words on paper dwarfs all other interests and whose absorption in his craft eventually leads him to destroy himself. Symbolism aside, Selected Letters is also a work of stark historical significance.' (The Guardian)
'A splendid collection.' (The Independent)
'This handsome volume is a welcome addition to those of the collected fiction and memoirs that have already done so much to revive Maclaren-Ross’s reputation.' (The Daily Telegraph)
'The wreck of Maclaren-Ross’s life is everywhere in the pages of Selected Letters, presented and edited with critical zest by Paul Willetts, who seems to have single-handedly and single-mindedly recovered from the dust of oblivion the actual achievement of this haunted, troubled and self-destructive man… If you want to know the real inside story of the roots of contemporary culture… then Selected Letters takes you there.' (The Daily Telegraph)
'Selected Letters is a wonderful book, and also a rather telling one. The insights it gives to the struggling writer, determined to work for themselves, not the market, reminded me of George Gissing’s New Grub Street, written about fifty years before these letters and set just around the corner from Fitzrovia. Both are invaluable guides for the aspiring writer today.' (3am Magazine)
Praise for Maclaren-Ross’s Bitten By The Tarantula and Other Writing
'One of the most original and perceptive film critics this country has produced. His 1946 essay on Hitchcock, for instance, was a decade or more ahead of its time.”' (Philip French, The Observer)