Beaming Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE, D.Litt. (Oxon), Mark Twain medallist and co-founder of the Hollywood Cricket Club (1881-1975), personified a rare oxymoron: he was a serenely contented writer. Shortly before the Queen awarded him a knighthood and the Queen Mother, a devoted fan, wrote a letter congratulating him, Madame Tussaud’s sent an artist from
Last Chorus: An Autobiographical Medley, by Humphrey Lyttleton ‘Old Etonian ex-Guards Officer jazz trumpeter’. That was the way tabloid gossip columnists used to describe Humphrey Lyttelton (1921-2008) in the early years of his fame. Not long after he was released from the Grenadiers at the end of the second world war, he hyphenated his identity
Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac, better known as Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), the son of French-Canadians spiced with the blood of Mohawk and Caughnawaga Indians and subdued, no doubt, by migration from Quebec to Lowell, an old mill town in Massachusetts, eventually fulfilled his adolescent ambition to live the life of the eccentric ‘artist’ . . .
She was born Kathleen Annie Pannonica Rothschild. Her father, Nathaniel Charles Rothschild, an ardent lepidopterist, named her Pannonica, Nica for short, as a tribute to the region in Hungary where he met her mother and captured a particularly interesting moth. Nica married a French aristocrat and became the Baroness de Koenigswarter. When he divorced her
Patrick Skene Catling has written the Bookends column in this week’s issue of the magazine. Here it is for readers of this blog: She was born Kathleen Annie Pannonica Rothschild. Her father, Nathaniel Charles Rothschild, an ardent lepidopterist, named her Pannonica, Nica for short, as a tribute to the region in Hungary where he met
Autobiography provides a sound foundation for a work mainly of fiction. A voyage in an ocean liner provides a sound framework of time and place. Michael Ondaatje was born in Ceylon in 1943 and migrated to Canada at the age of 19. The Cat’s Table is an entirely believable, warmly empathetic novel about an 11-year-old
Dreaming Iris by John de Falbe Love, whether originally mental or glandular, a coup de foudre or a gradual smouldering incandescence, fulfilled or not, constitutes the basis for most readable fiction. In Dreaming Iris, John de Falbe, abiding by this tradition, examines the effects of imaginary love on two real but fragile relationships. He has
About 80 per cent of books sold in this country are said to be bought by women, none more eagerly than Joanna Trollope’s anatomies of English middle-class family life. Her 16th novel, Daughters-in-Law (Cape, £18.99), is sociologically and psychologically as observant as ever, showing how not to be a suffocatingly possessive mother-in-law. About 80 per
Patrick Skene Catling has written the Bookend column in this week’s magazine. Here it is for readers of this blog. About 80 per cent of books sold in this country are said to be bought by women, none more eagerly than Joanna Trollope’s anatomies of English middle-class family life. Her 16th novel, Daughters-in-Law, is sociologically
Anthropomorphism and a weird, astringent sense of humour combined to make The Queue, the late Jonathan Barrow’s only novel, a work of genius in the opinion of his brother Andrew. Anthropomorphism and a weird, astringent sense of humour combined to make The Queue, the late Jonathan Barrow’s only novel, a work of genius in the
Derek Hill (1916–2000), writes Bruce Arnold, was an English representational landscape and portrait painter of ‘haunting and evocative creative spirituality that is perhaps indefinable’. Derek Hill (1916–2000), writes Bruce Arnold, was an English representational landscape and portrait painter of ‘haunting and evocative creative spirituality that is perhaps indefinable’. But the biographer was undeterred. As an
Kafka was right: ‘Strange how make-believe, if engaged in systematically enough, can change into reality.’ But Barry Humphries, at the age of 76, manages much of the time to control his vacillating schizoid tendencies in nice equipoise. In his autobiography More Please, he stated that Edna Everage was a figment of his imagination. In this
The Matterhorn, at 14,679 feet in the Alps, is said to be very difficult to climb. It is an apt military designation for a (fictional) jungle peak that United States Marines were ordered to assault, abandon and assault once more, against fierce opposition, to establish an artillery base near the North Vietnamese border during the
In the Rainbow Grill in New York one evening in 1971, according to Robin D. G. Kelley, Professor of History and American Studies at the University of Southern California, Duke Ellington halted his band in mid-flow and announced: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the baddest left hand in the history of jazz just walked into the room,
In this splendid, monumental slab of a book, Desmond Fitzgerald, the 29th Knight of Glin, has made the chronicle of his family epitomise the whole turbulent history of Ireland since the arrival of the Normans. The survey includes chapters by academic genealogists and other historians, with less formal contributions from the Knight himself and his
When Lavinia Greacen undertook her magisterial yet intimately sympathetic biography of James Gordon Farrell, she gained access to his diaries and many of his letters, especially love letters and letters to his literary agents, editors and publishers about his professional desires and requirements. In this supplementary volume, a selection of her prime sources is presented
Delicious is a word that keeps coming to mind as one reads Jane Gardam’s new novel. Delicious is a word that keeps coming to mind as one reads Jane Gardam’s new novel. Delicious and poignant. The 81-year-old author’s mood is elegiac, and so eventually is that of Elizabeth, Betty, the wife of Sir Edward Feathers
Surviving, by Allan Massie The Death of a Pope, by Piers Paul Read Coward at the Bridge, by James Delingpole Alcoholism, with its lonely inner conflict between escapism and conscience, is an inexhaustible subject for literature. The emotional agony of addiction is fascinating, as long as it is other people’s. Allan Massie, the illustrious Scottish
‘This is a work of non-fiction,’ Alexandra Fuller writes. ‘But I have taken narrative liberties with the text.’ She presents a fictionalised account of the life and early death of one man to personify the tragedy of a whole generation in the modern American West, which is no place for John Wayne heroics. With the
‘A satisfactory novel should be a self-evident sham,’ in an opinion Flann O’Brien (1911-1966) shared with one of his fictional characters, ‘to which the reader could regulate the degree of his credulity’. Furthermore, the inhabitants of novels should be allowed ‘a private life, self-determination and a decent standard of living’. The distinction between reality and