After a preliminary bombardment, a party of Conservative politicians has assaulted the BBC, enraged by its treatment of the Falklands crisis. Fierce fighting took place, but there was no loss of...
‘Has lost the right arm; black, small moustache; black stunted whiskers not meeting under the chin but inclined to grow backwards towards the ears; regular nose; handsome face, inclined to be...
In 1972 I started work on a study of Denys Finch Hatton and his relationship with Karen Blixen. The biographer’s nightmare is the knowledge that an important collection of papers pertaining...
In the first chapter of this book, a chapter which concerns the time of our marriage, Alvarez has cast me in a variety of roles, from Jungle Jane to Giant Sloth. It may come as a surprise to him to find...
Iris Murdoch’s novels are philosophy: but they are philosophy which casts doubts on all philosophy including her own. She is an author whose project involves an ironic distance not only from her...
It is not easy to see what purpose this book is meant to serve. Koestler himself has written two excellent works of autobiography, An Arrow in the Blue and The Invisible Writing, and two others,
John Mortimer’s book has a thoroughly misleading title. It is designed to enlist a little pathetic sympathy for someone carried along like a piece of flotsam without the courage or...
On the morning of 16 April 1980, two well-known Oxford figures chanced to meet in the High. ‘Have you heard the good news?’ called out the one, the former head of a prestigious...
Lying in bed with a cracked rib, I have been much consoled by these genial books about Wodehouse. The only dangerous one was Wodehouse on Wodehouse, since I was compelled to laugh aloud,...
If you saw pictures of female miners carting coal around, or loading trucks, would you exclaim ‘How appallingly Victorian!’ or ‘How fantastically modern!’? It was not till...
‘Women are bitches.’ It was odd and ugly of J.R. Ackerley to put it like that, since both the sentence before this terse rancour and the one after it dote upon a bitch, his dog...
The Young Rebecca is a collection of the writings of Rebecca West from 1911 to 1917, selected and introduced by Jane Marcus, with just the right amount of explanation and comment. In one respect...
Mrs Jean Harris, a trim widow of 56, was a woman who had reason to congratulate herself on making a success of her life. She had risen from undistinguished but respectable suburban beginnings to...
These two books make an intriguing tandem, the one a broad perspective of the whole span of Mussolini’s life, the other a detailed study of less than three years. The wider canvas is a...
If you want to get ahead in the world, you cannot afford to be contemptuous of or ironic about your own fantasies. It is indeed important to be able, as Wordsworth puts it, ...
A biography of Conrad that makes no claim to add to the voluminous information already on record, but runs amiably and quite deftly over the course, may have its uses. Not everybody has the time...
This country has faced the choice of war or peace on some ten or twelve occasions during my lifetime. I was too young to have an opinion on the outbreak of the First World War, then known as the...
‘I grew up,’ says Patricia Hearst, describing what life had once been like for the granddaughter of Citizen Kane, ‘in an atmosphere of clear blue skies, bright sunshine,...