SOURCE: “Wasp at Large,” in Times Literary Supplement, October 8, 1993, p. 30.

In the following review of Yesterday Came Suddenly, Keates praises King's “busy, populous chronicle of a literary life.”

The boy Francis King tasted “a brine-like salt” on his father's forehead when, reluctantly, or at any rate unspontaneously, he kissed him goodnight. The taste, his autobiography's Proustian memory spur, turned out to be a malign portent of disease and death, and it is the presence of these two elements, spectral or all too palpable, which lends a melancholy consistency to [Yesterday Came Suddenly, a] busy populous chronicle of a literary life.

A remittance child, like Kipling's Punch in “Baa Baa Black Sheep”, he was shipped home from India to be shuffled between aunts and uncles; the Kings, radical Bohemians who lunched him at Rules and talked to him like a grown-up, and the Reads, gushing, ribald, philistine and supremely...