[An English biographer, critic, nonfiction writer, poet, and editor, Ackroyd is known for his novels that focus upon the interaction between artifice and reality and emphasize the ways in which contemporary art and life are profoundly influenced by events and creations of the past. In the following excerpt, he offers a positive assessment of the stories comprising Angels at the Ritz.]

Angels at the Ritz is one of the most imaginative and substantial books I have read this year; the fact that it is a volume of short stories is probably beside the point, although it may be an indication of the way good English writing is going. Perhaps the most interesting writer of my own generation, for example—Ian McEwan—has gained a reputation through just one volume of short stories.

Mr Trevor is a very accurate, not to say painstaking writer and it is the particular virtue of his writing that he should be the observer rather than the fantasist, and that his prose should characteristically be one of definition and description rather than of image and metaphor. In 'In Isfahan', the first story of the book, a middle-aged man knows the truth about himself but will not share it, even with a stranger in a strange country. In 'The Tennis Court', a tennis party is held in an old lady's ramshackle house, in the interval between two wars; from such small beginnings, a story of life and power grows beyond the dreams of a hundred serious novelists. In Office Romances', it is seen to be better to suffer from illusions than to have none at all. Trevor, through all of these stories, manages that combination of a dispassionate prose style with some highly sentimental and even inflammatory content. In 'Mrs Silly' a young boy disowns his mother in one of those small acts of treachery that will last a lifetime. The story is so perfectly modulated, the boy's unspoken life so accurately conveyed, and each scene so carefully arranged that Trevor, perhaps despite himself, emerges as the master of the short story in its English guise.

But a short story can be merely a story, and Trevor brings to his form a number of larger issues. 'Angels at the Ritz', the title-story, is a study of men and women who grope blindly towards an understanding of themselves in their middle age. There is always that large question in Trevor's stories which remains unanswered: When did everything change for the worse? He is adept at conveying the loneliness of people, the intractability of their plight and the suffering which can be caused from living without illusions. It is this which makes Trevor's direct and sometimes neutral prose so effective, since it seems to record all of those events which cannot be explained and are always endured. Life simply goes on, and Mr Trevor represents it. He never admits to anything so general as this, of course, and it must be said that it is the small touches—the local details, the brief moments of insight, even the names of his characters—which make Trevor so outstanding a writer:

She felt ashamed of herself for having tea with him, for going to see him when she shouldn't, just because Poppy was dead and there was no one else who was fun to be with. Leo Ritz and his Band were playing 'Scatterbrain' as she left the dance-rooms. The middleaged dancers smiled as they danced, some of them humming the tune.