Book Reviews

A couple of years ago in Jamaica, I met Errol Flynn’s former wife, the screen actress Patrice Wymore. Reportedly a difficult and withdrawn woman, her life in the Caribbean (apart from the few details she cared to volunteer) could only be guessed at. The Errol Flynn estate, an expanse of ranchland outside Port Antonio, was grazed by tired-looking cattle. ‘Haven’t we met before?’ Wymore said to me as I walked into her office after knocking. ‘You remind me of someone I know.’ I took in the riding crops and spurs hanging on the wall. After eight years of marriage, in 1958 Wymore had divorced Flynn, who died the following year

He was always lucky, and he knew it: lucky in the secure rural intimacy of the upbringing described in Cider with Rosie; in the love of some passionate, clever women, whose guidance and support get rather less than their due in As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning; and in having survived the Spanish civil war — the subject of A Moment of War — despite seeing action (though on his part this involved more seeing than action) in the terrible last battle of Teruel, and being imprisoned three times as a suspected spy. Behind and beyond all that, he was lucky in his gifts: charm, which included a knack

Despite being an earl, Rochester is very nearly a major poet. His poems and letters were torn up by a zealous mother after his death, bent on destroying anything obscene or scandalous. A good deal was lost, but a lot was passed from hand to hand, copied and recopied (it was never printed in Rochester’s lifetime). His full development as a poet cannot be traced, but some of what survives is tantalisingly rich, and has fascinated many subsequent writers. He is one of those rare poets who come to mean much more to later generations. ‘Upon Nothing’ bears a bleak relationship to the end of Pope’s ‘Dunciad’, and, very powerfully,

This novel is based on the life of Charles Baudelaire and the relationship he enjoyed — or endured — with his Haiti-born mistress, his Black Venus, Jeanne Duval. We first see him in 1842, a young poet of 20, making his dandyish way through the slums of Paris to meet his friends at a cabaret theatre for an evening of wine and hashish. Here he will encounter for the first time his future muse. She is voluptuous, in a long red dress, singing risqué songs. In no time he is unlacing her boots and preparing to squander the legacy which he is shortly expecting. However, there are, as the author

Sport isn’t about putting a ball into a net or over a bar or into a hole. It’s about the people who are trying to do those things. Frank Keating, late of this and several other parishes and now just late, understood that truth, which is what made him such a great sports writer. Matthew Engel explains in the introduction to this anthology that his old colleague ‘liked sportsmen and made lasting friendships with them. This would be impossible nowadays.’ Most of the pieces report on those friendships rather than on matches: by portraying sportsmen as they were off the pitch Keating revealed what made them succeed on it. So

If you wanted a brief epigraph for Linda Grant’s recent fiction, then five words from Dorothy Parker might well do the trick: ‘Time doth flit/ Oh shit.’ Certainly, there aren’t many writers who seem so astonished, even affronted, by life’s tendency (admittedly a strange one) to pass by more quickly than you ever imagined. Her previous novel, We Had It So Good, followed a group of students from the Oxford of the late 1960s to the present day, where they were bewildered to find themselves in the unthinkable position of being quite old. Now her new one does the same with a group of students from the York of the