"A critic has no right to the narrowness which is the frequent prerogative of the creative artist. He has to have a wide outlook or he has not anything at all," (pp. 19-20).

"We are to visualize the English novelists not as floating down the stream [of time] ... but as seated together in a room, a circular room, a sort of British museum reading room, all writing their novels simultaneously," (p. 21).

"... those people writing in the circular room ... may decide to write a novel upon the French or the Russian Revolution, but memories, associations, passions, rise up and cloud their objectivity, so that at the close, when they re-read, someone else seems to have been holding their pen ... their self, no doubt, but not the self that is so active in time ..." (p. 38).

"The final test of a novel will be our affection for it, as it is...