Kingsley amis

‘The publisher who writes is like a cow in a milk bar,’ Arthur Koestler once declared. For some reason this put-down has never stopped publishers from fathering their memoirs, and the book trade titan’s life and times used to be as much a staple of the library shelf as slim volumes of nature poetry. As in other branches of life-writing, the procedural approach tends to vary. There are practical primers – Stanley Unwin’s The Truth about Publishing, say, from the year of the general strike, or Anthony Blond’s The Publishing Game (1971); there are delightful vagaries in the style pioneered by Grant Richards’s Author Hunting (1934); and there is the

Last Post is a collection of reminiscences, anecdotes and a settling of old scores by Frederic Raphael in the form of imaginary letters to many of the people who have been part of his long life. You might expect a nonagenarian’s critical faculties to have ‘mellowed by the stealing hours of time’, but far from it. Raphael’s intelligence and acerbic wit are undiminished.  George Steiner suffers a sustained attack for being gauche, malicious and too obviously ambitious Those who have crossed his path will be aware of his ability to ‘verbalise easily’ and, as he himself confesses: ‘It is one of my failings that I know how to hurt people.’

The way that language is shaped by the facts of biological sex is a rich subject. (The way that biological sex is framed, and sometimes refuses to be shaped, by language is perhaps one for another day.) Some languages have evolved forms which are distinctly those of male or female users. Japanese has speech patterns described as male or female, such as (male) the informal use of da instead of desu. There are scripts used exclusively among women, such as the syllabic Nüshu in Hunan, China. Many languages have gendered grammatical forms in ways that are not just metaphorical. Nouns such as ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ are masculine and feminine in

Searching for a 12-month stretch in the life of Elizabeth Jane Howard (1923–2013) that might illuminate the kind of person she was and the circumstances of her fraught and chaotic career, I settled on the year of 1955. Our heroine, then living in a maisonette flat in Little Venice and reading manuscripts for the publishing firm of Chatto & Windus, was hard at work on her well-received second novel, The Long View (1956). She was also having an affair with Arthur Koestler, who, when they entertained, her biographer tells us, expected her to ‘produce a three-course meal, look demurely beautiful and say as little as possible’. And so the year

Book reviews, John Updike once wrote, ‘perform a clear and desired social service: they excuse us from reading the books themselves’. It’s a theory, I’m afraid, that doesn’t apply to this review — but it certainly does to this book: an impeccably wide-ranging collection of Ferdinand Mount’s own non-fiction reviews, including for The Spectator, over three decades. Find yourself unaccountably vague on the premiership of Lord Rosebery? A little rusty on the life of George Gissing? Embarrassingly patchy on the history of Methodism? Thanks to Mount, there’s no need to plough through 500 pages on any of them — nor the more than 50 other subjects he covers. Now you

John Gross’s The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: English Literary Life since 1800, a standard text for anyone set on a life of writing about books, was intentionally truncated, ending its chronology before Gross’s own time of eminence. Two decades after the book’s publication in 1969, Gross explained in a new afterword that he had not wanted to comment on his peers and colleagues, for fear of misunderstanding or offence. A perfectly justifiable approach, but it made the book uncomfortably tantalising for those who prefer their gossip to be at the expense of the living. The Prose Factory is dedicated to Gross, and partially overlaps with The