Search Results

“... thoughts fixed on mankind and do not pass beyond that sphere.’ Not that I’m suggesting that Diana Melly is a Sufi, indeed there’s very little to suggest any path at all in her life, but the several possible responses a reader might have to Take a Girl like Me are much the same as for those encountering a seeker on the Path of Blame. In a review ...”

“... hospital, she still wanted to make changes. But in March Max died, and Jean wrote to her editor, Diana Athill:   I’ve dreamt several times that I was going to have a baby ...   Finally I dreamt that I was looking at the baby in the cradle – such a puny weak thing.   So the book must be finished, and that must be what I think about it ...”

“... concerned with social problems and music, one works in the Glastonbury Information Office, one is Diana Melly. This gives a certain bias to this deeply sympathetic book. We are listening to creative grannies. Creativity is hard, possibly on the nerves, but certainly on the conscience. They feel a responsibility to their own talent – ‘I thought, but ...”

“... of detachment – the first of these weaknesses arising from the second – are crucial flaws in Diana Melly’s second novel. The Goosefeather Bed is the story of an affair between Stella, an attractive woman in her mid-thirties, married to a bisexual art critic named Bernard, and a young man named Simon, who makes a frugal living by occasionally ...”

“... most people who’ve been publishers’ readers will tell you that that never happens. But one day Diana Athill came into my cupboard and said: ‘Will you just have a look at these, they’re by a West Indian writer, V.S. Naipaul’, I read them and wrote Diana a report in which I said: ‘I know we never do short ...”

“... of the 11 tapes which recorded Edward’s recollections of the first 27 years of his life. George Melly handled the tapes and later pruned and rearranged their contents. The book didn’t appear until five years later, but the recording had been a rush job for George, occupying four days between two singing dates with John Chilton’s Feetwarmers. Edward ...”

“... then, what do I know? My experience of high life is limited, but years ago, I think through George Melly, I used to be invited to parties given by Geoffrey Bennison, the fashionable interior decorator. He lived in Golden Square (‘Above Glorex Woollens, dear’) and there one would find Geoffrey in full drag, and very convincing drag it was too, as he made no ...”