Book review – Letters
John Updike’s letters overflow with lust, ambition, guilt and shame
‘Affairs are cruel, and if they are sin, they carry the punishment with them’, he wrote to one of the many women he cheated on throughout a long life
The making of William Golding as a writer
Letters between Golding and Faber’s Charles Monteith reveal just how much the author owed to his editor – not least in the choice of book titles
A little of Philip Larkin’s letters goes a long way
On 13 September 1964, at the age of 42, Philip Larkin began writing to his mother Eva (his ‘very dear…
First wife, enduring love: the passionate affair of John Osborne and Pamela Lane
Look Back in Anger, John Osborne’s 1956 play, was a fertile cultural seedbed: out of it sprouted the Angry Young…
The martyrdom of Proust
Why would a writer like Marcel Proust, who quivered and wheezed at the slightest sensation, decide to live surrounded by…
Who is Sylvia – what is she?
In May 1956, three months after meeting Ted Hughes, one before they will marry, Sylvia Plath writes to her mother…
A bad taste in the mouth
Here is the opening sentence of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s meditation on beds.: With its four legs and its flat, soft…
Rich and fruity
F.R. Leavis once denounced the Twickenham edition of Pope’s Dunciad for producing a meagre trickle of text through a desert…
What an absolute darling you are!
Iris Murdoch’s emotionally hectic novels have been enjoying a comeback lately, with an excellent Radio 4 dramatisation of The Sea,…
From Spike Milligan — and Marge Simpson — with love, light, peace and great respect
This book is a serious bit of kit. Its hard covers measure 28.9 by 21 centimetres, and it weighs 1.62…
Toujours la politesse
Robert Cumming’s opening sentence is: ‘Kenneth Clark and Bernard Berenson first met in the summer of 1925.’ One is then…
Flotsam and jetsam flung across the shore
Writing to a god seems a presumptuous thing. Who are we, feeble mortal creatures whose lives pass in the blink…
More brickbats from the old buffer
After Dear Lupin and Dear Lumpy, here’s a slightly more prosaically titled collection of letters from Roger Mortimer, longtime racing…
A don delights
The arrival of a letter from Hugh Trevor-Roper initiated a whole series of pleasures. Pleasure began with the very look…
Elder statesman of the Republic of Letters
Even Spectator book reviewers have to concede that their craft is inferior to the creative travail of authors. Henry James…
A pioneer at heart
Richard Davenport-Hines on the tomboy from Red Cloud whose evocation of the vast, unforgiving landscape of the prairies is unrivalled
