SOURCE: A review of The Ulcerated Milkman, in London Magazine, n.s. Vol. 5. No. 12, March, 1966, pp. 80-3.

Here, Toynbee expresses concern that Sansoni 's "extreme virtuosity may be sliding into the kind of professionalism which irons out all the natural wrinkles and awkwardness of a writer's imagination. "

Ever since he began writing, around the beginning of the last war, Sansom has been very much his own man. It is true that his first stories were written under the influence of Kafka, but that choice of influence by a young English writer at that time was itself an individual and almost eccentric act of abasement. It did not prove, in the event, to be a particularly significant one; for Sansom soon moved away from the allegorizing fantasies of his early stories to a sort of wayward and highly personal realism. He has chosen, ever since, to look at the...