The Bachelors

<p><b><i>The Bachelors </i>displays the best of Sparkian satire placing her at the heart of a great literary tradition alongside Waugh and Trollope Wilde and Wodehouse. It demands rediscovery.</b><br><br>'It's easy to see why Waugh admired <i>The Bachelors</i>. On one level it is a blithely carnivorous satire in the Waugh mould. The bachelors of the title - almost the only men we meet in the narrative - are the thirty-something male barristers teachers journalists and museum attendants of a small patch of West London. They lead inturned doddery superannuated lives pottering between grocers coffee-houses bedsits and the houses of their mothers and aunts. But the comedy here is serious in a way that Waugh's satanically energetic comedies of misery rarely are . . . comedies of English manners have seldom been darker' <i>Daily Telegraph</i><br><br>'My admiration for Spark's contribution to world literature knows no bounds. She was peerless sparkling inventive and intelligent - the cr&#232;me de la cr&#232;me' Ian Rankin<br><br>'Muriel Spark's novels linger in the mind as brilliant shards decisive as a smashed glass is decisive' John Updike <i>New Yorker</i></p>