Matthew Dennison 
Another bleak house on the Fens
Some years ago, Susan Hill stated in an interview: ‘It’s not plot that interests me but setting, people in a setting, wrestling with an abstract subject.’ In her ghost stories,… Read more
Old lovers…
If it is true that we demand of our favourite authors above all consistency — a certain fidelity to the territory that they have earlier marked out as their own… Read more
Bookends: Tilling tales
Several years ago, I listed as my literary heroes Herbert Pocket in Great Expectations and E. F. Benson’s Lucia. The latter was the more damaging admission. Lucia is an egotist… Read more
Prince of progress
The tragedy of Prince Albert was not that he died at the age of forty-two 150 years ago this month, but that his quick-tempered and lusty Hanoverian wife loved him… Read more
Death of the Author
The death of the Polish-born British novelist Joseph Conrad is the central event of David Miller’s debut novel. The death of the Polish-born British novelist Joseph Conrad is the central… Read more
UnEnglish triumph
Sometimes an exhibition does what it says on the tin. The Pre-Raphaelites and Italy, the Ashmolean’s first major show post-revamp, is such an exhibition. Sometimes an exhibition does what it… Read more
Pass the cheese, Louise
Widowhood in 1955 was not a desirable state. Not, at any rate, for Louise Bickford, heroine of The Winds of Heaven (first published in 1955, now reprinted by Persephone). Louise… Read more
More than a painter of Queens
The last words of Hungarian-born portraitist Philip de László, spoken to his nurse, were apparently, ‘It is a pity, because there is so much still to do.’ As Duff Hart-Davis’s… Read more
Big frocks, silk stockings and lissom ladies
Matthew Dennison on the life of Augustus Harris, the Victorian showman who invented the Christmas pantomime and pioneered sex, celebrity and excess as an art form Forget Lord Leighton and his… Read more
Dog days for British breeds
Imagine the scenario. You are a military man who retires at 40. Able-bodied, cushioned by a small army pension and the income from a rural estate in west Wales, you… Read more
Strangely familiar
In 1935, Noël Coward included in his series of playlets, Tonight at 8.30, a jaunty, song-filled exposé, in Victorian dress, of fam- ily relationships, Family Album. Penelope Lively’s novel of… Read more
The day the music died
An earnest young man upbraids his singing teacher. ‘Why don’t you sing classical more often?’ It is Bombay in the early Eighties. The young man’s father has enjoyed a successful… Read more
Not just for Christmas
I live with a supermodel — excessively fussy about diet and grooming. Sadly this gorgeous creature has four legs not two, and is a boy not a girl. He is… Read more
Pink and potent
Never gamble your pension on a food fashion. Last year sloes were everywhere. Even Waitrose sold them, hand-picked at a fiver a pop, in branches from the King’s Road to… Read more
Distinctive vision
Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelite Vision Manchester Art Gallery, until 11 January 2009 Needlepoint nose-dived during the 19th century. This came about, like so many errors of taste, through a… Read more
Home On The Grange
Few married men can match my boast of having been taught how to plump cushions by an interior decorator with a warrant to the Prince of Wales. The decorator in… Read more
Passionate collector
Masterpiece Watercolours and Drawings Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight, until 9 November Even passion has its limits. The first Lord Leverhulme — that ‘Soapy Billy’ who founded Lever Brothers… Read more
What’s in a name?
Quite a lot, says Matthew Dennison — and it’s not all good On a day of sultry heat, a uniformed health visitor stood in our London sitting-room. Around her feet… Read more
Not the marrying type
Those days are gone in which romantic novels had heroines called Muriel. Even on first publication 84 years ago, The Crowded Street was not a conventional romantic novel nor Muriel… Read more
Echoes of the invisible world
In 1958, Daphne du Maurier published a collection of short stories, The Breaking Point. Justine Picardie’s novel Daphne begins the year of the stories’ composition, 1957. Du Maurier, then Britain’s… Read more
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