Category: Literature

Death on the Bosphorus

I struggled at first with Dance to the Music of Time. It is otiose to allude to Powell’s circumlocutory style making Henry James’s prolix, copia verborum seem exiguous. However, I persisted and now I am hooked.

Oh Happy Day

I have just finished reading Len Deighton’s spy trilogy Berlin Game, Mexico Set, London Match. Immensely enjoyable but when I started, it was with a sense of nostalgia for all that Cold War stuff. Now two things have happened.

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Princess Margaret

I am sure I am not alone in deploring Craig Brown’s vulgar “biography” of Princess Margaret. It is a scurrilous hotch-potch of unreliable, disloyal and deeply offensive gossip garnered from a muck heap of diaries and newspaper articles.

Spam

I’m finding Anthony Powell slow going. He does not spoon-feed his readers. Towards the end of A Question of Upbringing Jenkins witnesses a meeting between Sillery and Buster. “Whatever they had found in common was satisfactory to Buster, too, since he laughed and talked with Sillery as if he had known him for years.”

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I’m into Something Good

An obsequious, chastened Pious brought him the gin on the stoop. Morgan poured two inches into a glass full of ice, added some bitters and a dash of water. He hated the drink but it seemed the apt thing to do; end of a tropical day, sundowners and all that.

I Never Met …

I never met Winston Churchill or Princess Margaret. My brother marched behind Churchill’s coffin when he was a young officer in the Irish Guards and Uncle George (aka Sir George Bellew) helped arrange the elaborate funeral.

Dance

I have decided that I am old enough to enjoy reading A Dance to the Music of Time. The first volume was published in 1951 when Anthony Powell was forty-six. It took him twenty-five years to complete the twelve volume series, although at first he only hoped that it might stretch to three books. Nevertheless… Continue reading Dance

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A Gentleman of Leisure

There are 1,321 boys at Eton and 821 at Harrow. Of course this fluctuates as boys come and go, sometimes under a cloud. Even after allowing for the greater number of Old Etonians it is apparent that the number of fictional Old Etonians exceeds fictional Old Harrovians by a big margin.

Chacun à Son Goût

Usually readers here are, more or less, on the same wave length as me. At lunch yesterday a friend said that she doesn’t read if my daily dose is about money and another said that she gets incredibly annoyed if it’s about politics.  That’s absolutely OK but what about this?

The Ghastly Affair

Rosherville Gardens was a seventeen acre site on the Thames not far from Gravesend in Kent. It opened in 1837 to provide a day out for Londoners, consisting of pleasure gardens adorned with statues, follies and more than 8,000 specimen trees. Visitors came by paddle-steamer and new attractions were added including bands, jugglers, sword swallowers,… Continue reading The Ghastly Affair