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“A son of the Free Church Manse brought up to Calvinism, he adopted at Oxford first rationalist philosophy, and then the social asumptions of the English establishment, and often writes as if he were in fact descended from a long line of Cotswold squires. His last work of fiction, Sick Heart River gives a lucid account of his own development, and seems to me to be a deliberate effort to reconcile himself with life and death throught the charcter of Edward Leithen, of whom he says, 'it is possible to keep your birth-right and live in a new world - many have done it.' But not, I think, without acquiring a permanent inner loneliness and sense of exile.” — J.B. Pick
A son of the Free Church Manse brought up to Calvinism, he adopted at Oxford first rationalist philosophy, and then the social asumptions of the English establishment, and often writes as if he were in fact descended from a long line of Cotswold squires. His last work of fiction, Sick Heart River gives a lucid account of his own development, and seems to me to be a deliberate effort to reconcile himself with life and death throught the charcter of Edward Leithen, of whom he says, 'it is possible to keep your birth-right and live in a new world - many have done it.' But not, I think, without acquiring a permanent inner loneliness and sense of exile.