Search Results

“... to make yourself up as you go along, to score out the old self and start again on a new page: in Hunting Mister Heartbreak (1990), Raban adopts a different identity (John Rayburn, Rainbird) for each place he visits. In Waxwings, set in the ‘virtual city’ of Seattle at the height of the dot.com boom, American reality bites back. A professor’s ...”

“... in late middle and old age – for being aloof and misanthropic: ‘An unpleasant man,’ P.G. Wodehouse told an interviewer in the 1970s. Kenneth Clark, with whom Hastings says Maugham enjoyed a ‘firm friendship’, described him as ‘an extremely mysterious character’; Christopher Isherwood likened him to a Gladstone bag: ‘God only knows what is ...”

“... Irish, or is Eagleton making that up?’ A lot of tedious spadework there, as a character in P.G. Wodehouse remarks when his interlocutor seems not to grasp the meaning of the word ‘pig’. This incident apart, the only other similarity between Henry James and myself is that we both had grandfathers from County Cavan in Ireland – though James’s ...”

“... needed a name that sounded as ordinary as possible, he had to look no further than the title page of Bond’s great work. Why does the name of an actual ornithologist sound so right as the name of a fictional spy? Why couldn’t Fleming have used another pair of common monosyllables – John Clark, say? Bond is a solid, blue-chip, faith-giving kind of a ...”

“... straight from Bertie Wooster, but Sayers’s snobbish fantasies lack any of the sunniness of P.G. Wodehouse. The prurience and violence which must be a large part of their appeal grew from a darker cranny in the mind of this particular maker. Her first tale – Whose Body? – concerns the discovery in the bath of a naked corpse, supposed, until the arrival ...”

“... which liked to parade a certain literary pedigree. A month after Huxley’s arrival in 1937, P.G. Wodehouse left, but J.B. Priestley, Hugh Walpole and Anthony Powell were all hawking their wares with varying degrees of success (Powell was hindered by the fact that his agent had dropped dead on Hollywood Boulevard a few days before his visit). Unlike ...”

“... golf a day, to keep his handicap down to ten (about the same as Ian Fleming and better than P.G. Wodehouse). On the links at North Berwick, when he made a bad shot, he would turn away and gaze over the Forth and then turn round again, smiling. At times he sounds like a fully paid-up member of the Drones club. No one, after all, was better equipped to live a ...”

“... the work of a distinguished biographer whose earlier subjects include Arthur Conan Doyle and P.G. Wodehouse. This may appear to be a strangely assorted group, but Edwards has always been fascinated by enigma and mystery, and the psychology of people who are particularly successful manipulators of language The author of the Irish Constitution, and of the ...”

“... so on. The professor didn’t want appointments made on the basis of ‘what it says on the front page of the Times magazine section’ – but he hadn’t read Mandelbrot either. Such differences about what is significant have implications beyond the hiring policy of the Institute. They prove that you are dealing with New Science and its uncertainties, that ...”

“... ingest material of no value whatever. Both like Kipling, Conrad, the Sherlock Holmes stories, P.G. Wodehouse, George Moore in selected books, while (notwithstanding the fact that these were Lyttelton’s old pupils) both look on Orwell as overrated, and neither has much enthusiasm for Connolly. Lyttelton is unexpectedly lukewarm about Shakespeare, except the ...”

“... death. But what makes the record so prodigious is that, while quite possibly out-producing P.G. Wodehouse, whose life centred on the typewriter, Russell, especially in his middle years, lived a tempestuous personal life; and among many other activities, played important public roles as a feminist, an opponent of the First World War, and a leader in the ...”

“... ushered over the threshold by Waugh’s butler (the date is 1949, when outside the pages of P.G. Wodehouse butlers were a virtually extinct species) he encountered the man he described as his ‘idol’. ‘After an elaborate reaction of exaggerated astonishment, there came, “But I thought you’d be black! ... What a disappointment! My wife and I had both ...”

“... her dashing fiancé, fresh from his English public school, with Laurence Olivier looks and P.G. Wodehouse affectations. As it turns out, he is a bigoted wife-beater, who never even makes it into middle management. Like her mother, Pookie, Sarah turns to drink and self-delusion. Her sister, Emily, meanwhile, wins a scholarship to Barnard, and embarks on a ...”

“... Slump and how to cure it, and, by extension, right about the Old Gang blocking his path? Martin Pugh’s publishers tell us breathlessly that ‘this book demonstrates for the first time how close Britain came to being a Fascist state in the interwar years.’ Is that a fact or just a pretty piece of hype? Does the limelight that Mosley continued to hog ...”

“... culture’. Does any of this matter, or is it just the cod-philosophical equivalent of P.G. Wodehouse, an agreeable distraction from the unpleasing realities of contemporary life? I think it does, partly because it helps to prevent people gaining a proper understanding of the relation of their society to its past, and partly because it’s ...”