Sheba Toilet Requisites Co. who is temporarily separated from his wife. Mr McKechnie – the lazy, white-haired and white-bearded, teetotal and snuff-taking Scot who owns the first bookshop. Mr Cheeseman – the sinister and suspicious owner of the second bookshop. Mr Erskine – a large, slow-moving man with a broad, healthy, expressionless face who is the managing director of the advertising agency, the New Albion Publicity Company, and promotes Gordon to a position as a copywriter. Literary significance and criticism Cyril Connolly wrote two reviews at the time of the novel's publication. In the Daily Telegraph he described it as a "savage and bitter book", and wrote that "the truths which the author propounds are so disagreeable that one ends by dreading their mention." In the New Statesman he wrote that it gave "a harrowing and stark account of poverty", and referred to its "clear and violent language, at times making the reader feel he is in a dentist's chair with the drill whirring". For an edition of the BBC Television show Omnibus, (The Road to the Left, broadcast 10 January 1971), Melvyn Bragg interviewed Norman Mailer. Bragg said he "just assumed Mailer had read Orwell. In fact he's mad on him." Of Keep the Aspidistra Flying Mailer said: "It is perfect from the first page to the last." Orwell wrote in a letter to George Woodcock dated 28 September 1946 that Keep the Aspidistra Flying was one of the two or three of his books that he was ashamed of because it "was written simply as an exercise and I oughtn't to have published it, but I was desperate for money. At that time I simply hadn't a book in me, but I was half starved and had to turn out something to bring in £100 or so." Like A Clergyman's Daughter, Orwell did not want the book reprinted during his lifetime. Orwell's biographer Jeffrey Meyers found the novel flawed by weaknesses in plot, style and characterisation, but praised "a poignant and moving quality that comes from Orwell's perceptive portrayal of the alienation and loneliness of poverty, and from Rosemary's tender response to Gordon's mean misery". The novel has won other admirers besides Mailer, notably Lionel Trilling, who called it "a summa of all the criticisms of a commercial civilization that have ever been made". Tosco Fyvel, literary editor of Tribune from 1945 to 1949, and a friend and