In his review of my book Fiction's Madness, ^{Reference Clarke1} Beveridge comments on my omission of Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy in discussing the history of the novel form. ^{Reference Beveridge2} On fictional development in the 1950s, Hawthorn ^{Reference Hawthorn3} pointedly excludes Tristram Shandy as anticipating the novel and I made plain that the (postmodern) changes I observed ‘came into common usage in Europe and the Unites States in the last three decades or so’ (Hawthorn: p. 62). To negate (my) differentiating modernist fiction from the 1950s postmodernist ‘shift’ might make good criticism if not merely advanced as opinion.

On my text choices being idiosyncratic, I acknowledged this inevitability (p. vi) before providing choices of others as a balance, including David Goldberg. But this was ignored and readers left with assumptions of my eccentricity.

I did not identify psychoanalysis as a dominant force in the 1930s. I asserted its significance as an interest in Freudianism, in the 1920s, with ‘think-tanks’ involving John Rickman, Lionel Penrose, A. G. Tansley and John Bowlby, who qualified medically in the 1930s. This interest persisted into the 1950s, some medical superintendents being conversant with psychoanalysis whose emergent tensions, in psychiatry, I addressed in my chapter on Pat Barker's Regeneration. ^{Reference Barker4}

On Kafka's Metamorphosis being a short story: I quote acclaimed literary critic Harold Bloom: ^{Reference Bloom5} ‘Considering the origins of this great short novel, The Metamorphosis’ (p. 65).

In effect, your reviewer ignored most of my book, opting for points of little intellectual interest. As for my (perceived) disparaging remarks about psychiatry ‘throughout the book’, my critical take on psychiatrists Dr Yealland (Chapter 3) and Dr Weir-Mitchell (Chapter 5) stemmed from fiction. My ‘disparaging comments’ were exceptionally sporadic but their effect clearly outweighed the rest of my text.

It is false that I ‘dismiss’ Nietzsche, Socrates and Foucault. I critically quoted Foucault thus: ‘Shall we try reason: to my mind nothing could be more futile’ (p. 66). I attributed only to Socrates that he was Plato's mouthpiece and placed my take on Nietzsche within Hesse's Steppenwolf and Richard III.

In general, the review was ill-considered, selectively dismissive and factually inaccurate.