Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Bainbridge, Beryl (Vol. 131) - Kate Saunders (review date 1 May 1998)

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Kate Saunders (review date 1 May 1998)

SOURCE: “History As You Have Never Seen It Before,” in New Statesman, May 1, 1998, p. 59.

[In the following review, Saunders offers praise for Master Georgie.]

Some well-established novelists, garlanded with praise and blunted by success, become tired or lazy, or allow their once zeitgeisty voices to date. Not Beryl Bainbridge, who gets better and better. Master Georgie completes a trilogy of remarkable historical novels, following The Birthday Boys and Every Man For Himself.

The novels themselves have no links, except that they revisit events overburdened with legend—Scott's last expedition, the sinking of the Titanic—and cut away all received notions. This is history as you have never seen it. Heaven help you if you like your Great Moments softened and sentimentalised. Like a latter-day Lytton Strachey, Bainbridge knocks down monuments merely by...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Colin Thubron (review date 23 September 1984)
   2. David Punter (essay date 1985)
   3. Suzon Forscey (review date 12 January 1986)
   4. Richard Ingrams (review date 22 August 1987)
   5. Nicci Gerrard (review date 5 January 1990)
   6. Francine Prose (review date July 1991)
   7. Nancy Engbretsen Schaumburger (review date Fall 1991)
   8. Francis Spufford (review date 20 December 1991)
   9. Andro Linklater (review date 4 January 1992)
   10. Michael Cross (review date 11 April 1992)
   11. Elisabeth Wennö (essay date 1993)
   12. Dennis Drabelle (review date 10 April 1994)
   13. Gary Krist (review date 17 April 1994)
   14. Michael D. Schaffer (review date 9 June 1994)
   15. Amy Gamerman (review date 13 July 1994)
   16. Judith Freeman (review date 7 August 1994)
   17. Alex Clark (review date 6 January 1995)
   18. Judy Cooke (review date 13 September 1996)
   19. Jane Gardam (review date 14 September 1996)
   20. John Updike (review date 14 October 1996)
   21. Karen Heller (review date 22 November 1996)
   22. Susan Heeger (review date 24 November 1996)
   23. Kate Saunders (review date 1 May 1998)
   24. Daniel M. Murtaugh (review date 6 November 1998)
   25. Francine Prose (review date 29 November 1998)
   26. John Gallagher (review date 7 December 1998)
   27. Gail Pool (review date January 1999)
   28. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt (review date 5 August 1999)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright