
The Bachelors displays the best of Sparkian satire placing her at the heart of a great literary tradition alongside Waugh & Trollope Wilde & Wodehouse It demands rediscovery' It's easy to see why Waugh admired The Bachelors On one level it is a blithely carnivorous satire in the Waugh mould The bachelors of the title
- almost the only men we meet in the narrative
- are the thirty-something male barristers teachers journalists & museum attendants of a small patch of West London They lead inturned doddery superannuated lives pottering between grocers coffee-houses bedsits & the houses of their mothers & aunts But the comedy here is serious in a way that Waugh's satanically energetic comedies of misery rarely are comedies of English manners have seldom been darker' Daily Telegraph' My admiration for Spark's contribution to world literature knows no bounds She was peerless sparkling inventive & intelligent
- the creme de la creme' Ian Rankin' Muriel Spark's novels linger in the mind as brilliant shards decisive as a smashed glass is decisive' John Updike New Yorker