Category: Literature

When I Was Five

“A house in Kensington and £2,000 a year.” Sounds a bit like some thing from the pen of Muriel Spark, doesn’t it? Well, you’d have to sell the house these days. When I started in the City I never aspired to a residence in Kensington but I thought that I could jog along on £4,000… Continue reading When I Was Five

Alms for Oblivion

This is the SOE Memorial on the south side of the Thames outside Lambeth Palace. It was unveiled in 2009 and the bust is of Violette Szabo. Last Sunday I attended a ceremony at which representatives from Norway, Serbia and our own armed services laid wreaths around the memorial. A contingent of cadets from the… Continue reading Alms for Oblivion

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Categorised as Literature

Phoney

Kingsley Amis kicked it off with Colonel Sun in 1968. “It” is the craze for continuation novels and authors such as Agatha Christie, P G Wodehouse and Arthur Conan Doyle have all been victims of this literary mugging.

The Man Who….

This post is about someone who wrote more than 170 novels, 18 plays and 917 short stories. In 1928 a quarter of all books sold in the UK were by this author. One more clue: this person wrote the screenplay for King Kong.

All The King’s Horses

All The Queen’s horses, of course, and in 2013 there were still 501 of them in the British army. More than there are tanks, only 227.

Leather Armchairs

Leather Armchairs is a book by Charles Graves, the poet Robert’s brother, published in 1963. It has a foreword by P G Wodehouse, which is a good start, and it describes sixty of the London Clubs then extant.

“Shall we go straight in?”

Kingsley Amis rated this the most depressing question. This is of course complete nonsense. “Shall I press the button now, Mr Putin?” depresses me a lot more. Even, “can you have a family of seven refugees to live with you?” is far from uplifting.

Walled Gardens

Walled Gardens is the title of Annabel Goff’s memoir about her childhood in the south of Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s. (Since describing William Waldegrave’s book as a memoir I now find that it is an autobiography: the former is a description of one part of a person’s life, the latter the whole thing,… Continue reading Walled Gardens

Rod and Net Fishing

The principal difference between shooting and fishing is that the former is Hatch & Release and the latter Catch & Release. The final outcome for pheasant and fish is very different.