“... him and so did everyone else.’ Who were the Dutch to presume to tell the British what to do? Sir Leslie Rowan of the Treasury prophesied cheerfully that the Messina Six would fall apart, which is what virtually the entire Whitehall machine prayed for. In vain did Russell Bretherton from the Board of Trade, our sole representative at Messina, desperately ...”

“... vignettes Some People, Lytton Strachey’s psychological melodrama Elizabeth and Essex and A.J.A. Symons’s detective mystery. The Quest for Corvo – all designed to find more imaginative and adventurous ways of writing non-fiction. What these authors were trying to do was to release biography from the mechanical processes of the card-index, the ...”

“... and appreciation to such various talents as Ian Fleming and Dick Francis, Michael Innes and Gladys Mitchell – all British writers. It is hard to believe that he hadn’t read, at some time between its first British publication in 1943 and the writing of ‘High Windows’ in 1967, a book by the writer regarded by many as the American master of the ...”

“... for example, and centrally, Gillian’s decision at sixteen to change her surname from that of Leslie Stone, her ‘strict … stern’ biological father, to that of Irving Rose, the ‘kind, equanimous, humorous’ Irishman her mother married next; the fabulously ‘over-ripe’ interpretation she develops, the Rock of Zion and the Romance of the ...”