Why I Live in the Country

HE Bates was content with the gift of putting the English countryside down on paper -- Peter J. Conradi * Guardian (on H.E. Bates) *
He has . . . an evident artistic sincerity, a finely drawn imagination, and a supple and polished prose * New York Times (on H.E. Bates) *
He wrote with a precise felicity, a sure observation expressed in an unerring sense of words . . . a prose poet . . . he was without an equal in England within the kind of story he had made his own and stood in the direct line of succession of fiction writers of the English countryside that includes George Eliot, Hardy and D. H. Lawrence * The Times (on H.E. Bates) *
The best short-story writer of his generation . . . Bates spun stories of sexual compulsion, menace, camaraderie, alienation and endurance * Telegraph (on H.E. Bates) *
HE Bates was a great storyteller, and a beautiful writer -- Steve Augarde * Independent (on H.E. Bates) *
His prose is simple in structure, yet quivering with colour, scent and heat . . . effortless opulence * Sunday Times (on H.E. Bates) *
He went on writing about England and the English villages and small provincial towns picking out the small people in vivid memorable language -- John Pudney * Daily Express (on H.E. Bates) *
One first notes his exuberant power of physicality, of evoking settings with delicate intensity * New Criterion (on H.E. Bates) *
He can invest whichever he is writing about with the greatest lyrical beauty, and often it is from the sternest touches of realism that his most lovely moments emerge . . . HE Bates can always bring the most vivid creation to what he is describing * New Clarion (on H.E. Bates) *
His work, like a piece of finely wrought tapestry, has no loose ends. He writes in soft colours * The Writer (on H.E. Bates) *
Bate's strength lies in basic uniformity, wholly natural absorption in rural life and character, lyrical feeling, and tragic awareness in response to human experience . . . vivid and memorable -- Frederick Alderson * London Magazine (on H.E. Bates) *
Bates is a master of the short story, and the novella . . . He has a sharp, clear vision of character showing itself in a situation, and can completely convince the reader -- David Garnett (on H.E Bates)
No one . . . has succeeded in capturing the same elusive beauty as Mr Bates and in rendering it in such flexible English prose -- Edward J. O'Brien (on H.E. Bates)
His garden is like his prose: well planned, clean, nurtured, and, in effect, rich and astonishingly beautiful -- Richard Church (on H.E. Bates)