SOURCE: “In Scott's Footsteps,” in Times Literary Supplement, December 20, 1991, p. 24.

In the following review, Spufford offers favorable evaluation of The Birthday Boys.

My grandmother was born in March 1911, the month in which this novel starts. Its famous events, then, are still in one sense within the reach of living memory. While Beryl Bainbridge's “birthday boys”—“Taff” Evans, “Bill” Wilson, “Con” Scott, “Birdie” Bowers and “Titus” Oates—were ragging each other in the polar snows, and stepping out the stately dance of class divisions, and dying, my grandmother's parents ran a small Turkish Delight factory in the West Country. But at the weekends, a world away from ice and darkness, and at least one social level beneath the officer corps, they too were devotes of the Edwardian style of fun. They went on country jaunts, they japed, played Wellsian practical jokes and called each other by nicknames as silly...