Search Results

“... as we emerged from our hobbit holes and combed the cobwebs from our hair: the starship arrival of Blake Bailey’s authorised biography of Philip Roth, Philip Roth: The Biography. The ‘the’ of the subtitle said: accept no substitutes. Another biography of Roth was in the offing, Ira Nadel’s Philip Roth: A Counterlife, a sizeable, solidly ...”

“... the marriage was under so much strain that Cheever’s father invited an abortionist to dinner. As Blake Bailey writes in his biography: ‘It was a story that haunted Cheever the rest of his life … Not surprisingly, he saw fit to blame his mother for having the bad taste to tell him of the episode.’ The family was affluent at first, living in a large ...”

“... Blake’s father was Albert Behar, whose Sephardic Jewish family cut him off with less than the proverbial shilling because of his marriage to a Dutch Christian woman called Catherine Beijdedvellen. Behar Senior then became a British citizen, having served in the French Foreign Legion and the British Army. On his death in 1936 – a bad period not only in England but throughout Europe – he left a widow and the young George in somewhat reduced circumstances ...”

“... MountWhat Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life, Mark DotyPastoral, James RebanksPhilip Roth, Blake BaileyWilliam Golding, John Carey17 June. Rupert’s birthday. Rupert goes into the office for a meeting with the management of Condé Nast and, after 21 years as editor of World of Interiors, gives in his resignation. Then by the 15.33 train to Leeds. As ...”

“... with hackneyed and misleading metaphors like ‘the language of clothes’. So I turn to Richard Bailey’s Images of English: exhilarating material drawn from the less gleaned acres of language history. On the controversies over post-Renaissance style, we have not only Gil, Bullokar and Puttenham but Camden, Carew and Verstegan. On the 19th-century problems ...”

“... in Darling, before Julie Christie came along. She danced on Ready Steady Go!, modelled for David Bailey, introduced Bob Dylan to London, broke Peter Blake’s heart, was part-owner of a frock shop in Carnaby Street, married and gave birth to a daughter all before dying in 1966 at the age of 28. Her story was remembered but ...”

“... Philip Roth and William Styron had pinned up above their desks a famous Flaubert aphorism, which Blake Bailey quotes in his Roth biography: ‘Be orderly and regular in your life, like a bourgeois, so that you may be wild and original in your work.’ It is a wonderful, uplifting quote, even if the translation seems to be a little ...”

“... Elvira – nor to pity her. Stead’s greatest moral quality as a novelist is her lack of pity. As Blake said, Pity would be no more, If we did not make somebody poor, and, for Stead, pity is otiose, a self-indulgent luxury that obscures the real nature of our relations with our kind. To disclose that real nature has always been her ...”

“... had a difficult relationship with his father, Philby was badly shaken. A few months later, George Blake, who’d been studying at the Arabic language school run by the Foreign Office at Shemlan just south of Beirut, was arrested under the Official Secrets Act and put on trial at the Old Bailey. The Soviets had been careful ...”

“... all three men was withdrawn and the jury entered formal verdicts of not guilty. Outside the Old Bailey, Imran Khan commented: ‘We are extremely disappointed with the judge’s ruling and would have hoped the identification evidence could be put before the jury – something that happens in nearly every case.’ Clearly, the emotion of the moment had made ...”