Susannah Clapp has been the theatre critic of the Observer since 1997. She helped to found the London Review of Books, where she was assistant editor for thirteen years. She has worked as a publisher’s reader and editor at Jonathan Cape, and as the radio critic of the Sunday Times. She is the literary executor of Bruce Chatwin and Angela Carter and is the author of books about both writers: With Chatwin and A Card from Angela Carter.
In 1963 Shelagh Delaney published a story based on the hate mail and begging letters she received when A Taste of Honey made her famous. ‘It is probably fair to say that it is one of the best plays ever written by a 19-year-old photographer’s assistant. But … she knows as much about adult behaviour as she does about elephants’; ‘Will you lend me...
Rhoda Power photographed around 1910.
As a child I worried about the Russian Revolution. After all, it failed. At least that’s what schoolfriends, teachers and neighbours said. Yet I knew believers: my parents and a small core of companions who flew the red flag in improbable outposts, first Bath, then the London suburbs. Up to his death in the mid-1980s my dad, far more...
Here is an antidote to current traps and poisons. People who rescue rather than attack, who move in a physical, not a virtual, world, who don’t morally triage others. Who put themselves in danger without aiming to get famous or on television. Who risk their lives without being paid.
Dominic Gregory has worked as an adviser to literary estates, including Roald Dahl’s, and...
It is a fascinating and fawning exhibition. At the King’s Gallery (until 18 October) some three hundred items of clothing belonging to Queen Elizabeth II are displayed – headless, limbless, fleshless – like the remains of extinct animals. Norman Hartnell supplies silky flamboyance and encrustations: lace re-embroidered with sequins and crystals. Hardy Amies, fresh from a...
Little magazines : big guns. It is hard to overestimate the high hopes and strong feelings swirling around papers which are small in funds and circulation but large in aspiration. For a time the London Review of Books might have been considered a little magazine: uncertain of its future but clear it wanted to put a spoke in the Falklands War. The Little Review, thought to have originated...
Angela Carter didn’t enjoy much of what she called ‘the pleasantest but most evanescent kind of fame’.
Susannah Clapp’s memoir of Bruce Chatwin has little in the way of hard-going and nothing of the comprehensive record that bloats a literary biography. It makes no claims about the relation...
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