SOURCE: “History As You Have Never Seen It Before,” in New Statesman, May 1, 1998, p. 59.

In the following review, Saunders offers praise for Master Georgie.

Some well-established novelists, garlanded with praise and blunted by success, become tired or lazy, or allow their once zeitgeisty voices to date. Not Beryl Bainbridge, who gets better and better. Master Georgie completes a trilogy of remarkable historical novels, following The Birthday Boys and Every Man For Himself.

The novels themselves have no links, except that they revisit events overburdened with legend—Scott's last expedition, the sinking of the Titanic—and cut away all received notions. This is history as you have never seen it. Heaven help you if you like your Great Moments softened and sentimentalised. Like a latter-day Lytton Strachey, Bainbridge knocks down monuments merely by highlighting all the little things that did not fit in to the accepted versions. Her heroes...