“... he respected or got on with were often women: Elizabeth Bowen, Olivia Manning, Margaret Drabble, Alison Lurie. The letters from Farrell’s years of post-Booker fame are an education in the glamour of English literary celebrity. ‘I don’t want to be interfering about your azalea,’ he writes to Drabble, ‘but shouldn’t it have more light?’ To ...”

“... and using a homemade Ouija board all those years, seem positively peasant-like and self-reliant. Alison Lurie recently described Merrill in Connecticut, chatting in his kitchen as he sliced up ‘a ripe red tomato with his little serrated knife’. Roussel, by contrast, did not want any indication that the food on his plate in the carefully controlled ...”