Parsimony

It is hard to believe that the 1983 Nobel Prize in Literature would have been awarded to the author of titles such as The Chinese Have X-Ray Eyes, Here Be Monsters or – yes – An Erection at Barchester. But if William Golding had had his way, so it might have proved. Charles Monteith, his loyal editor at Faber & Faber, saved him from himself; and thus it was that those books were called instead Pincher Martin, Darkness Visible and The Spire. For whatever reason, Golding thought himself a monster and his journals seethed with self-disgust Even Golding’s first and most famous novel, Lord of the Flies (1954), started life

Samuel Pepys didn’t much like the subject of Dennis Sewell’s new biography. Sir George Downing (1623-84) was for a short time Pepys’s boss at the Exchequer, during which period the diarist observed that his employer was ‘so stingy a fellow I care not to see him’. Despite being one of the richest men in Restoration London, Downing’s parsimony was legendary and was the subject of one of the Diary’s most celebrated comic anecdotes. Having recently purchased a country estate in Cambridgeshire, Downing learned that it was customary for the landowner to host a Christmas dinner for the poor of the parish. Anticipating a grand celebratory affair, crowned by a belt-loosening