Search Results

“... weather’s fine by me, just so long as you don’t talk like that. The anthology, illustrated by Ronald Searle, has a charming dedication ‘to the Unknown Man whose photograph was found hidden in a copy of the Bazar Book of Decorum (1870)’.I don’t know if there’s a book of etiquette that deals with metropolitan literary life, but there ought at ...”

“... atrocious. His diaries, written by Geoffrey Willans (a one-time schoolmaster) and illustrated by Ronald Searle, originally appeared in Punch, as a kind of sequel about a boys’ school to Searle’s St Trinians drawings. They were published in book form as Down with Skool! (1953), How to be Topp (1954), Whizz for ...”

“... to the north. What I kept thinking about instead, I hope not unconscionably, was a matched pair of Ronald Searle plates for one of Geoffrey Willans’s Molesworth books, showing a Gaul marching on Rome and a Roman marching on Gaul. What one pencil-sucking hack at the poolside of the Bujumbura Novotel was heard to call Rwanda’s ‘ethnic ...”

“... present. One would hardly believe it if it had not actually been done. But it has been done, in Ronald Searle’s wartime drawings. They fall into three groups: trainee soldiering in England, the voyage out, and the encounter with the Japanese in Singapore and Siam. All are bristling with life, but it is the third and largest group that stand out as a ...”

“... a Guernica – or if they did they didn’t get one. No Goya or Otto Dix emerged – the drawings Ronald Searle made in a Japanese prison camp come closer than anything officially commissioned. It was only after the war, in Francis Bacon’s screaming, distorted figures, that something was produced that could conceivably be thought of as addressing the ...”

“... the names of Paul Ives, Graham Paine (‘who lost his life by drowning’), Clifford John Dunn, Ronald Alexander Pinn and John Hill, all of whom were born in the 1960s, as I was, and died early.The practice of using dead children’s identities began in the Metropolitan Police Force in the 1960s. Until very recently, it was thought, in-house, to be a ...”