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Books

Literature's least attractive power couple

A review of ‘Pamela Hansford Johnson: Her Life, Works and Times’, by Wendy Pollard, which takes this spiky novelist – and her dreadful husband, C.P. Snow – at their own inflated valuation

20 September 2014

9:00 AM

20 September 2014

9:00 AM

Pamela Hansford Johnson: Her Life, Works and Times Wendy Pollard

Shepheard Walwyn, pp.499, £25, ISBN: 9780856832987

This book charts the rise and fall of one of the strangest power couples of modern times. The senior partner was initially Pam Johnson, a rising literary star, 28 years old and happily married with five novels under her belt and a fiction column on the Liverpool Post, when she singled out a novel by an obscure Civil Service scientist called C.P.

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Available from the Spectator Bookshop, £23. Tel: 08430 600033. Hilary Spurling was literary editor in the 1960s. She is writing the authorised biography of Anthony Powell.

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