Category: Literature

Shadows on the Grass

Walking in Chiswick in the evening I thought about Simon Raven. Like Leslie Charteris, Dornford Yates, John Buchan and Sapper I am the last generation that will read him.

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The Collector

James Agate was a drama critic for The Sunday Times and the BBC. Between 1935 and his death in 1947 he published nine volumes of diaries. Wryly he called them Ego.

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Charles Boutell

I share some of the same interests and initials as CB. He is a Victorian, a Norfolk man, no fool; he went to St John’s Cambridge (BA) and Trinity Oxford (MA).

London Perceived

I have marched across Spain with VS Pritchett and hacked across Spain with two middle-aged ladies; Penelope Betjeman’s account of rural Andalusia in November 1962. The latter fulfills all the requirements of a great travel book.

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Hot Dogs

“Despite their promises at the last Election, the politicians had not yet changed the climate. The State Meteorological Institute had so far produced only an unseasonable fall of snow and two little thunderbolts no larger than apricots. The weather varied from day to day and from county to county as it had done of old,… Continue reading Hot Dogs

Smells

On a recent visit to Trumper’s to have my hair cut I bought a bottle of Portugal Eau de Toilette. I suggested to the salesman that I expected mule dung with top notes of drains and stale urine.

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Off to Sunny Spain

Books describing the authors’ walking trips are a genre I find irresistible. Today I want to narrow down the field to 20th century accounts of walks in just one country.

Ending Up

Kingsley Amis peaked early with Lucky Jim, published in 1954 when he was 32. He never wrote anything remotely as good and it beats me how Ending Up got nominated for the Booker Prize. I suppose the judges warmed to it as it’s only 113 pages.