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Martha Jane and Me: A Girlhood in Wales 
by Mavis Nicholson.
Chatto, 243 pp., £14.99, November 1991, 0 7011 3356 2
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Vanessa Redgrave: An Autobiography 
Hutchinson, 300 pp., £17.99, October 1991, 0 09 174593 4Show More
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... material to pad out tome after fresh tome on Graham Greene, or George Orwell, or P.G. Wodehouse, or Evelyn Waugh, or Bernard Shaw, or Cyril Connolly? Must we prepare our shelves for yet another cache of letters, stumbled across like Dead Sea scrolls, every decade? If so, will they, too, rank high with biographers as first-hand testimony to what ...

What’s it for?

Martin Loughlin: The Privy Council, 22 October 2015

By Royal Appointment: Tales from the Privy Council – the Unknown Arm of Government 
by David Rogers.
Biteback, 344 pp., £25, July 2015, 978 1 84954 856 4
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... In his 1928 book, Sir Almeric FitzRoy (not, so far as I know, a pseudonym taken from a P.G. Wodehouse novel) felt that the attempt to justify the council’s existence was bound to end in tears. FitzRoy persisted, he tells us, in the hope of encouraging ‘a class of readers who are not, as a rule, attracted by what are commonly regarded as serious ...
A Midsummer Night’s Dream 
edited for the Arden Shakespeare series by Harold Brooks.
Methuen, 164 pp., £8, September 1979, 1 903436 60 5
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... have the old series still coming out. Full information, and a proper apparatus at the foot of the page: where else would you find that? It has got a bit stiff in the joints; the Introduction is so long and so full of standard doctrine that it is hard to pick out the plums; but the sobriety itself is a comfort. One major new emendation is proposed – that ...

He don’t mean any harm

John Bayley, 28 June 1990

A.A. Milne: His Life 
by Ann Thwaite.
Faber, 554 pp., £17.50, June 1990, 0 571 13888 8
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... family entertainment. But even in 1930 there were those who were having a go at Milne, like P.G. Wodehouse with the children’s poet Rodney Spelvin – a good-natured dig but spot-on – and Richmal Crompton, whose William has very little time for ‘Anthony Martin’, whom he once encounters in the flesh. Yet William is an equally reassuring figure, whom ...

Getting on

Gabriele Annan, 20 December 1984

The Ledge between the Streams 
by Ved Mehta.
Harvill, 531 pp., £12.50, July 1984, 0 00 272153 8
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... their conversation sounds like a Platonic dialogue brought almost up to date with help from P.G. Wodehouse, Angela Brazil and an elderly Times leader writer. Ved had two older brothers and three immensely endearing elder sisters: Pom, gentle and responsible; warm-hearted, idealistic, tomboyish Nimi; and sharp-tongued Umi. There was also a younger ...

Blacking

John Bayley, 4 December 1986

Evelyn Waugh: The Early Years 1903-1939 
by Martin Stannard.
Dent, 537 pp., £14.95, October 1986, 0 460 04632 2
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... of his admirers read him, and still read him, as if he were a fashionably black version of P.G. Wodehouse. This was natural enough for an author who considered his books ‘quite external to himself’, and who wrote his letters in the tone appropriate to a successful adventurer (‘I am living like a swell in Albany, as it might be Lord Byron ... or any ...

Humming along

Michael Wood: The Amazing Thomas Pynchon, 4 January 2007

Against the Day 
by Thomas Pynchon.
Cape, 1085 pp., £20, November 2006, 0 224 08095 4
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... Mason & Dixon there is a considerable speaking role for Vaucanson’s mechanical duck. But here on page 1 is a group of boy adventurers called the Chums of Chance, heroes of a series of jolly books with titles like The Chums of Chance and the Evil Halfwit and The Chums of Chance Search for Atlantis, not to mention The Chums of Chance and the Curse of the ...

Flying the flag

Patrick Parrinder, 18 November 1993

The Modern British Novel 
by Malcolm Bradbury.
Secker, 512 pp., £20, October 1993, 0 436 20132 1
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After the War: The Novel and English Society since 1945 
by D.J. Taylor.
Chatto, 310 pp., £17.99, September 1993, 9780701137694
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... Look up the checklist and you will find a large number of genre writers, from Brian Aldiss to P.G. Wodehouse, whose names are virtually absent from the main narrative. Bradbury’s book is based on an entirely conventional notion of the fictional mainstream. One can imagine a very different history of fiction in our century. The notion of the mainstream or ...

Uplifting Lust

E.S. Turner: Mills and Boon, 6 January 2000

Passion’s Fortune: The Story of Mills and Boon 
by Joseph McAleer.
Oxford, 322 pp., £25, November 1999, 0 19 820455 8
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The Romantic Fiction of Mills and Boon 1909-1995 
by Jay Dixon.
UCL, 218 pp., £11.99, November 1998, 1 85728 267 1
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... more than 200 million novels in 100 overseas markets, translated into 24 languages (on another page the total is put at a mere 160 million). We are asked to believe that a novel is sold every two seconds. In Britain the firm claims the allegiance of four out of ten women. Almost all the 1500 writers of these stories are women, an embarrassment for the ...

If you don’t swing, don’t ring

Christopher Turner: Playboy Mansions, 21 April 2016

Pornotopia: An Essay on Playboy’s Architecture and Biopolitics 
by Beatriz Preciado.
Zone, 303 pp., £20.95, October 2014, 978 1 935408 48 2
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Down the Rabbit Hole: Curious Adventures and Cautionary Tales of a Former Playboy Bunny 
by Holly Madison.
Dey Street, 334 pp., £16.99, July 2015, 978 0 06 237210 9
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... Mailer, Arthur Conan Doyle, Margaret Atwood, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, Saul Bellow, P.G. Wodehouse, Anne Sexton and John Updike. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 was first serialised in the magazine. ‘I only read it for the articles,’ joked subscribers, of which there were more than a million by the end of the decade. A lifetime’s supply cost ...

He wants me no more

Tessa Hadley: Pamela Hansford Johnson, 21 January 2016

Pamela Hansford Johnson: Her Life, Works and Times 
by Wendy Pollard.
Shepheard-Walwyn, 500 pp., £25, October 2014, 978 0 85683 298 7
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... Dante, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Hugo, Proust and Yeats as well as Michael Arlen, Clemence Dane, P.G. Wodehouse and G.K. Chesterton. Johnson kept lists of all the books she read (90 in 1931, although she was working full time), with ratings: ‘bunk’, sometimes, or ‘the worst rubbish of the year’, or ‘dull, dull, dull’. (This left its mark on her ...

Bunny Hell

Christopher Tayler: David Gates, 27 August 2015

A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me 
by David Gates.
Serpent’s Tail, 314 pp., £12.99, August 2015, 978 1 78125 491 2
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Jernigan 
by David Gates.
Serpent’s Tail, 339 pp., £8.99, August 2015, 978 1 78125 490 5
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... closely printed pages of dutiful third-person narrative. Peter Jernigan is better company on the page, largely because in the novel named after him he tells his own story. He’s writing, he indicates early on, in an institution of some kind – it turns out to be a drying-out facility – and has no memory of being rushed to hospital from the snowbound ...

Funny Mummy

E.S. Turner, 2 December 1982

The Penguin Stephen Leacock 
by Robertson Davies.
Penguin, 527 pp., £2.95, October 1981, 0 14 005890 7
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Jerome K. Jerome: A Critical Biography 
by Joseph Connolly.
Orbis, 208 pp., £7.95, August 1982, 0 85613 349 3
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Three Men in a Boat 
by Jerome K. Jerome, annotated and introduced by Christopher Matthew and Benny Green.
Joseph, 192 pp., £12.50, August 1982, 0 907516 08 4
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The Lost Stories of W.S. Gilbert 
edited by Peter Haining.
Robson, 255 pp., £7.95, September 1982, 0 86051 200 2
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... 1944. Leacock held his own in the world of Will Rogers, Robert Benchley, James Thurber, the early Wodehouse, A.P. Herbert and ‘Beachcomber’. Americans, or some of them, accepted him as a successor to Mark Twain. His Yankee-style hyperbole did not, for once, upset the British, for he practised the tricks of ‘sly English humour’ too. He was too near ...

Ladies

John Bayley, 4 September 1986

An Academic Question 
by Barbara Pym.
Macmillan, 182 pp., £9.95, July 1986, 0 333 41843 3
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A Misalliance 
by Anita Brookner.
Cape, 191 pp., £9.95, August 1986, 0 224 02403 5
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... stick them on the books. ‘I stuck on one of the labels, slightly crooked.’ Humorists like P.G. Wodehouse can be something of a trial to read because the humour is part of their professional equipment – their patter, as it were. This is not the case with Pym. It is embarrassing to record one’s delight in her things, because those who feel the same will ...

Take my camel, dear

Rosemary Hill: Rose Macaulay’s Pleasures, 16 December 2021

Personal Pleasures: Essays on Enjoying Life 
by Rose Macaulay.
Handheld Classics, 256 pp., £12.99, August 2021, 978 1 912766 50 5
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... shelves of dons, the superior type of schoolmaster (the other type has Kipling, Ian Hay and P.G. Wodehouse), and in the average well-to-do home’. Initial reviews of Personal Pleasures – ‘most amusing’, ‘delightful’, ‘an ideal bedside book’ – were along these lines, calculated to please a publisher but suggesting something altogether ...

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