Category: Literature

The Life

I expected twelve volumes of James Lees-Milne’s diaries to last me through the winter but like a case of wine they were consumed more quickly than anticipated. I finished them with considerable sadness one morning last week.

Published
Categorised as Literature

Best Books

“It is a good deal more than unlikely that any writer now living will produce a better historical novel than Henry Esmond, a better tale of children than The Golden Age, a sharper social vignette than Madame Bovary, a more graceful and elegant evocation than The Spoils of Poynton, a wider and richer canvas than… Continue reading Best Books

Published
Categorised as Literature

HP Sauce

“In my father’s house are many mansions” (John 14:2). I stay in a house with many bedrooms and in every one is a copy of Rathcormick: a Childhood Recalled (2001) by Homan Potterton.

Published
Categorised as Literature

Amlodipine

I have been feeling off-colour all summer. There is a constant metallic taste in my mouth, loss of appetite and general lassitude. I feel tired after quite short walks. I feel twenty years older than I am.

Black Mischief

I am re-reading Black Mischief. It is laugh-out-loud funny. Cyril Connolly was not best pleased to be depicted as the drunk General Connolly with a Negress wife called Black Bitch, although later she is elevated to Duchess and is delighted.

Bees’ Knees

The transformation scene in Richard Strauss’s Daphne, mentioned yesterday, is being played out in reality in my life.

Writers Bloch

On Tuesday morning I was reading James Lees-Milne’s diaries. I have got as far as 1979 and he has formed an intense friendship with Michael Bloch. Later I went to lunch at the Savile and was delighted to meet him there.

Published
Categorised as Literature

Secondhand in Chiswick

On Sundays Robert plays tennis in Chiswick and last weekend he suggested that I walked there to meet him for lunch. The transition from the, frankly, run-down purlieus of Hammersmith to chi-chi Chiswick is remarkable.

Back to Basics

I read Venetia Ansell’s blog with interest because her life is so different to my own. She divides her time between Bangalore and an up-country coffee plantation she has bought with her husband and where they live, rather primitively by my standards.

Published
Categorised as Literature

Sword of Bone

Anthony Rhodes was born in 1916. He went to Rugby and the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. The army sent him to Trinity College, Cambridge to study Mechanical Engineering. He graduated in 1939 just in time to join the Royal Engineers and serve in France as part of the British Expeditionary Force.