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London Review of Books

One word says to its mate subscriber-only content

Claire Harman

  • The Nightfisherman: Selected Letters of W.S. Graham edited by Michael Snow and Margaret Snow

In the Tate Gallery St Ives exhibition catalogue for 1995 there is a comical photograph of the painter Bryan Wynter and some friends at Zennor in themid-1950s. They are seated round a bottle-strewn table. Wynter is smiling absently, Karl Weschke is looking down at his hands or the tablecloth, a woman lies slumped in an armchair and a young man holds his head in an attitude of total weariness. At the other side of the table, the poet W.S. Graham is holding forth. He sits bolt upright, stabbing the air with the fingers of one hand; it looks as though an electric shock is passing through his body. It seems as if no one in the room apart from Graham has said anything for some time.

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Claire Harman’s biographies of Fanny Burney and Robert Louis Stevenson are available in paperback. She is writing a book about Jane Austen’s fame.