One of the boys: From Scenes Like These, by Gordon M. Williams, reviewed
An accident on the football pitch ends young Dunky Logan’s dreams of playing professionally – leaving him trapped with the lads in the ‘lair of their ordinary world’
Comfort reading for the interwar years
The Book Society’s recommendations in the 1930s included novels by Dorothy Whipple, E.M. Delafield, C.S. Forester and A.J Cronin, with popular history from Arthur Bryant
Why are publishers such bad judges when it comes to their own memoirs?
Anthony Cheetham has been responsible for many bestsellers, but this guarded account of his career in the book trade won’t be one of them
The exquisite vanity of the male sports writer
A good place to catch the highbrow sports journalist in action is the ‘Pseuds Corner’ column of PrivateEye, where he…
What will become of George Orwell’s archives?
The news that a vast cache of material by and concerning George Orwell is about to be cast to the…
Reluctant servant of the Raj: Burma Sahib, by Paul Theroux, reviewed
Few personal details survive about Eric Blair’s life as a policeman in Burma, making his years in the East fertile ground for the novelist
Onwards and upwards
The great age of the Scottish autodidact must have ended a century ago, but it had a prodigious impact while…
Wrong time and place
Dan Rhodes’s career might be regarded as an object lesson in How Not to Get Ahead in Publishing. Our man…
A study in parental tyranny
In a career stretching back to the mid-1980s, Robert Edric has so far managed a grand total of 28 novels,…
Not long for this Erth
‘Challenging stuff,’ my wife remarked, having alighted on the page of Paul Kingsnorth’s new novel in which a character named…
Would Faber & Faber still exist without T.S. Eliot?
Like many a 20th-century publishing house, the fine old firm of Faber & Faber came about almost by accident. The…
Spirits of the Blitz
If the early Martin Amis is instantly recognisable by way of its idiosyncratic slang (‘rug-rethink’, ‘going tonto’ etc) then the…
Cats, curates and cardigans
Anyone who has ever listened to the thump of a rejected manuscript descending cheerlessly on to the mat can take…
A hint of the numinous
Heaven knows what the millions of purchasers of the Man Booker-winning Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies will make…
The thrill of the chase
Charles Palliser’s debut novel The Quincunx appeared as far back as 1989. Lavish and labyrinthine, this shifted nigh on a…
