J. L. Carr
I enjoyed Jonathan Raban's miscellany, For Love and Money (Collins Harvill, £10.95), because here in Kettering, apart from 98-year-old Edmund Kirby (who used to give H. E. Bates free English lessons on Saturday morning after Bert left the gram- mar school prematurely), one doesn't get much shop-talk about the book-writing trade. I found A. L. Barker's The Goose- boy (Hutchinson, £9.95) splendid, re-read Penelope Fitzgerald's Innocence and made a third excursion into Graham Swift's Waterland, that bold and entertaining novel.
My favourite writer, Joseph Conrad, let me down with his Arrow of Gold and, after a first reading of George Eliot's Mill on the Floss, I feel quite sure that she became so bored with it that she drowned hero and heroine in a single short sentence.
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