Category: Literature

Guy Burgess

Andrew Lownie spent thirty years researching this book and interviewed more than a hundred sources, as the list of acknowledgements attests.

High Treason

Is it too soon to digress? Don’t muddle High Toast with High Treason; the former an agreeably astringent snuff but the latter is also to be taken seriously. In ‘the good old days’, the existence of which is very doubtful, the usual punishment for dabbling in the latter was hanging, drawing and quartering.

The Roxburghe Club

Few clubs are as exclusive as the Roxburghe, founded in 1812 and limited to forty members; indeed there have only been 350 members in the club’s 206 year life.

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Lush Places

The title is an homage to William Boot’s column in The Beast (vide Scoop, Evelyn Waugh, 1933). Whether it is mild weather or competition from feeders in the cemetery, our avian amigos are not making their way, ‘feather footed through the plashy fen’, to the feeders in the back garden.

Big Breakfast

I don’t often have breakfast and rarely brekker in bed. A cup of strong coffee suffices. Recently this routine was interrupted by Robert bringing me a muffin with egg and bacon at an early hour.

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A Christmas Dozen

A sub-optimal aspect of Christmas as a child was writing thank you letters. Here are twelve such letters invented by John Julius Norwich and published in his Christmas Crackers, 2000 – 2009.

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Mortdecai

Yesterday I did some Christmas shopping in Jermyn and St James’s streets. The only gift that I know will be well received is my present to me.

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Who Dunnit?

There’s a lot of comfort in a good old-fashioned detective novel written in the first half of the 20th century. I exclude anything by Agatha Christie – her’s bore me stiff.

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Categorised as Literature

Jeeves in Japan

Why are the Japanese obsessed with butlers? Kazuo Ishiguro’s Man Booker winner in 1989, The Remains of the Day, has a butler as its central character.

Dinner was rather strained

On February 13th 1935 Harold Nicolson was again staying with Betty Morrow, Dwight Morrow’s widow, and Anne and Charles Lindbergh at Englewood, New Jersey. This is what he wrote to Vita the following day.