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“... consequences be for the interloper? Which will prevail, revenge or forgiveness?Four of the novels Lawrence Osborne has published over the last decade – The Forgiven (2012), Hunters in the Dark (2015), Beautiful Animals (2017) and The Glass Kingdom (2020) – follow this pattern, with a fifth, The Ballad of a Small Player (2014), that varies it by ...”

“... working on the film of Look back in anger she met the ‘golden-haired, blue-eyed Apollo’, John Osborne – a man she declares ‘incapable of feeling either sexual jealousy or sexual guilt’. This incapacity came in handy. When his musical about gossip columnists flopped, he took off for the Continent with his designer – leaving his wife surrounded by ...”

“... and he was being regarded as a shining light of the ‘new drama’, a sort of Edwardian John Osborne, and was joining in the controversy about the licensing of plays by the Lord Chamberlain’s office, a foreshadowing of the direction his energies would take in his later years. There followed, in rapid succession, a long list of novels and plays, mostly ...”

“... was still going up on Terence Rattigan’s Separate Tables. As soon as they saw the first act of Osborne’s play, the audience at the Royal Court suddenly and spontaneously knew that Rattigan’s already famous piece was flat, stale, unreal, unconfident, artificial, class-ridden. And that no doubt was the case; although, as Christopher Innes pointed out in ...”

“... were brought out in force: Bernard Levin (Sunday Times), Auberon Waugh (Daily Mail), John Osborne in the very first ‘John Osborne Review’ in the New Standard, a launching to which Quentin Oates devoted some well-placed sarcasms in one of the pieces by him on Amis’s reviewers. Though a majority of reviews were ...”

“... contrast to the avant-garde painters and sculptors associated with St Ives, where, as the critic Lawrence Alloway wryly noted, ‘the landscape is so nice nobody can quite bring themselves to leave it out in their art.’ Critical debate was lively and healthily factionalised, with Patrick Heron upholding a formalist approach in opposition to John Berger’s ...”

“... that devotes far more of its time to writers like the Sitwells than it does to Joyce, Pound and Lawrence, all three of whom receive no more than a handful of glancing allusions in the book as a whole. There is a single brief reference to Pound’s Cantos and four mentions of Wyndham Lewis. Sylvia Plath’s name surfaces only twice. The study is rich in ...”

“... he confessed his feelings. The women closest to him – aside from his mother – were Gertrude Lawrence, Marlene Dietrich and the ‘stylish, hot-tempered’ bisexual Gladys Calthrop, whom he met when she sat in the front row of his show at the English Club in Alassio and disrupted the performance with fits of giggles. As in Design for Living, which he ...”

“... and American leaders and officials. Peter Mandelson, then the EU trade commissioner, and George Osborne, the future chancellor, spent some time on the aluminium mogul Oleg Deripaska’s yacht Queen K off the coast of Corfu in 2008. Queen K, later renamed Clio and now renamed Altair, was in the Maldives when the sanctions arrangements began, and is currently ...”

“... the presentation of ‘Speak for England, Arthur’, the play within the play. The memoirs of T.E. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf occur in the original script and the visit to the country house on the eve of the First War, but these are presented as the memories of Hugh and Moggie, the upper-class couple who sit out the Second World War in the basement of ...”

“... Pool of Bethesda’ (1736) ‘Moses Brought before Pharaoh’s Daughter’ (1736) ‘Hannah Osborne, Daughter of John Ranby’ (c.1747-50) detail of ‘Captain Thomas Coram’ (1740)PreviousNext In a thoughtful essay Lamb himself attacked the notion that what is most Hogarthian about Hogarth is what is most broadly comic, most boisterous, most ...”

“... by this group of books. Where, if anywhere, does romantic love come in to the story of marriage? Lawrence Stone has asserted that it was a dangerous delusion introduced and fostered only by literature. Gillis sees it as playing an important role in courtship from early on, but as hedged about by rituals which were necessary since marriage not only created a ...”

“... after the government announced the Leveson inquiry, two suspects in the racist killing of Stephen Lawrence in 1993 were convicted of his murder. The Macpherson inquiry of 1997 had examined police failures to investigate the crime properly at the time, attributing this to ‘institutional racism’. But Macpherson didn’t thoroughly investigate allegations ...”

“... brought to order when, in the end, everybody died. It was a vainglorious mishmash of Dostoevsky, Lawrence and Huxley – to name but a few. With the temerity of youthful unconsciousness I sent the typescript to Eyre and Spottiswoode (I think it was), who had announced a competition for new novels. It came back without comment. After active service with the ...”

“... There’s an instance of that in the paper this morning, one of the officers criticised in the Lawrence inquiry off to pastures new with his pension and his hurt feelings. It’s also reported this morning that two of the presumably incriminating rifles used in the Bloody Sunday shootings and supposedly in the safe keeping of the Ministry of Defence have ...”