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“... a sympathetic biography by Peter Conradi, which may be too kind to her, and a sour memoir by A.N. Wilson from which even the concept of kindness appears to be absent. What with John Bayley’s Iris and the film of it, and all the ‘coo wasn’t she a one’ coverage of her sex life, she has had too much press as the novelist who did a lot of shagging and ...”

“... a style is how easy it is to parody. Pevsner’s is more difficult than it looks. It defeats A.N. Wilson in Who Was Oswald Fish?, as Simon Bradley points out in a wide-ranging essay on ‘Pevsner in Fiction, Theatre and Cinema’. Imitation even of the most laconic entries is difficult. Only Alan Hollinghurst, among Bradley’s examples, gets it nearly ...”

“... Command Performance of the film: ‘Tony saw Love Story in New York. Hated it.’ When Dennis Main Wilson says, ‘Ma’am, I have the honour to produce a little show called Till Death Us Do Part,’ she cuts down his faux modesty with: ‘Isn’t that that frightfully dreary thing in the East End?’ At the end of Carousel at the National Theatre, Richard ...”

“... only that Oswald is an insufferable name (Who was Oswald Fish? asks the initialled onomast A.N. Wilson), awash with the sub-Shakespearean sinister and histrionic, and darkly seconded by Mosley’s middle name (‘Sir Oswald Ernald Mosley’). For Tom is such a relief of a contrast to Oswald. It would have been difficult, however well-justified, to animate ...”

“... the Spectator. Carey’s cousins in populism sometimes include Simon Jenkins, Paul Johnson, A.N. Wilson and the late Auberon Waugh. An easy moralism animates this worldview. Picasso was a pig; Edmund Gosse was ‘a bore’; D.H. Lawrence hit Frieda and wanted to exterm-inate whole races; Virginia Woolf was a pretentious snob who said horrible things about ...”

“... one of the cruces of a growing body of biographical studies. In his stylish Life of 1990, A.N. Wilson declared: ‘That he fell in love with Mrs Moore, and she with him … cannot be in doubt,’ adding: ‘While nothing will ever be proved on either side, the burden of proof is on those who believe that Lewis and Mrs Moore were not lovers – probably ...”

“... how he got through so much work.‘House arrest, Steiner. House arrest.’16 September. A.N. Wilson thoughtfully weighs in, this time in the Evening Standard, comparing me with Liberace and Cliff Richard and saying I have been boasting about my sex life. ‘You silly prat’ is what I feel, wondering how anyone who writes for such a rag as the Standard ...”

“... doesn’t seem very long since I did the same for Roy Jenkins. At Bodley I’m overtaken by A.N. Wilson, who’s brought his gown in a Sainsbury’s bag, though it’s part of Roy Jenkins’s legacy that gowns are no longer required on such occasions. This doesn’t stop many of the voters swishing about in them for the benefit of their families, who are ...”

“... the heir to the non-existent throne, who was eight, was taken away from his imprisoned mother, aunt and sister and held separately, at first in the room that had been his father’s, and then in a secure cell, an oubliette. Louis-Charles died (or perhaps he didn’t) in the custody of the state. Perhaps he was rescued, and a substitute or changeling died ...”

“... biography. Not all libraries have yet consigned to the skip two excellent earlier Lives, A.N. Wilson’s Hilaire Belloc (1984) and Robert Speaight’s The Life of Hilaire Belloc (1957). If a debunker were needed for this wittily bellicose (‘Bellocose’, Wilson suggests) Catholic author of more than 150 publications ...”

“... two wonderful people.’ On the appearance of these same words, more or less, in the Sun, A.N. Wilson, writing in the Evening Standard, warned that ‘Mr al-Fayed should be wary of losing our sympathy’: Mr al-Fayed is yet again giving a very unfortunate impression to that public he wishes so desperately to please. The impression received is that he is ...”

“... 1999 things sped up. Peter Conradi’s portly authorised biography was smartly challenged by A.N. Wilson’s slimmer unauthorised memoir, Iris Murdoch as I Knew Her, a witty, affectionate, impious account which made disturbing suggestions about Bayley’s feelings towards his wife. There was also Iris, a film with Kate Winslet and Judi Dench as younger and ...”

“... corpus of anecdotes to work with, untrustworthy tales retrieved and rehearsed by Gilchrist, Mona Wilson and the rest. The interpretations – efforts to understand their own incomprehension – attempted by other poets: Rossetti, Yeats, Swinburne, Ruthven Todd, Kathleen Raine. The inducting of Blake into a spiritual brotherhood. The bones of the life ...”

“... his three older brothers and one younger sister between quite different households – a religious aunt in the country and a worldly aunt in town. He had failed to finish his degree in law. He had dropped out of a career in the military. He gambled heavily and as a result had lost a great deal of property. His new novel, The ...”