One has to go back to Samuel Beckett's first published fictional work to find the image that is to figure almost continuously in the novels as well as in the plays, to find the character round which the Beckett world moved. The collection of short stories which make up the volume called More Pricks than Kicks relates the adventures of Belacqua…. Here is a stasis that was to pursue (or should it be pin down) those creations that were to stand out in so markedly an individual manner.

Nor was it by chance that the hero in this book was named Belacqua. The Dante in the title of the first story gives the clue. The name comes straight out of the Purgatorio. Little seems to be known about him in real life except that he was a lute maker in Florence, a friend of Dante and notorious for...