Search Results

“... The facts of Denton Welch’s brief life are fairly well known, partly of course because they were his sole subject-matter as a writer. He was born in 1915, the youngest of three brothers, and spent much of his boyhood in China, where his father had business interests. His adored mother (an American, and a Christian Scientist) died when he was 11, and this event caused him a deep emotional disturbance, at the height of which he ran away from his much-detested public school ...”

“... In 1936 Denton Welch, who was then an art student at Goldsmiths College and had no thoughts of becoming a writer, suffered an appalling accident. He was bicycling from Greenwich down the main Brighton road, on a Whitsun holiday, when a car ran into him, fracturing his spine and leaving him a permanent invalid, till his death in 1948 at the age of 32 ...”

“... in ‘non-fiction’, it is possible to provoke a different response – like the response of Denton Welch in A Voice through a Cloud when he observes a specialist’s treatment of a patient who has cut his head, falling in an epileptic fit. Norman Lewis is sometimes in danger of being commended with those nasty reviewers’ phrases, ‘heartless ...”

“... so that a steam goes up, waving, wreathing its shadow across this page as I write.’ That is Denton Welch, who liked to write ‘as I write’. His great admirer, Barbara Pym, liked to record buying matching underclothes, chosen for the pleasure of imagining someone else seeing them. This is an important aspect of love in a diary – you imagine the ...”

“... I would never have admitted my addiction to my circle of somewhat intellectually snobbish friends. Denton Welch yes. Beverley Nichols no. Even at that time he was at best a camp joke linked to the equally risible Godfrey Winn, something he didn’t deserve: he was always far superior to that stingy and treacherous little reptile, weeping his crocodile ...”

“... being a self-effacing romantic singleton who would not be out of place in a short story by Denton Welch. Now we have the wonders of the near-at-hand, located in and around the Black Mountains of Radnor. Mr Chatwin’s strange new place accommodates the lore of twinship in the manner of a romantic work which is also, in some degree, a religious ...”

“... We may feel we have met this clever-naif teenage narrator before, in the novels of J. D. Salinger, Denton Welch and Colin MacInnes. But the device is still successful; and Nicky is, in a surprising way, a prize ...”

“... like them, a driveller and a show. The dedication of The Place of Dead Roads is (surprisingly) to Denton Welch and Kim Carsons. Welch was the archetypal sedentary writer, crippled in a bicycle accident. Carsons (playing off ‘Kit Carson’) is the typical man of action, whom inactive writers invent and in whom they ...”

“... the diary references to desire for a boy seen on Port Meadow or a young man mowing. A Kilvert or a Denton Welch are able to make the most of their kind of sexual vitality in their writing, but Hopkins seems haunted less by guilt than by inadequacy as a kind of substitute for guilt. The simple-minded notion that he would have done much better as a poet if ...”

“... parts assembled from interviews) Marina Warner has done a great service. Carrington, like Denton Welch (both painters as well as writers) created a world coloured by an invalid’s intensity of feeling. Once tasted, its flavour is not forgotten. The English village and the Coming-Out Ball are well-worn sets in the scene loft of the English ...”

“... winning and intime about it. Barbara Pym’s journal records her love of it, as of the books of Denton Welch, another colourful figure from Horizon and the Connolly epoch. That common Mauritanian lobster, apparent survivor from the days of Gérard de Nerval and the dandies of Paris, touched an unexpected chord in the common reader of our own Home ...”

“... the nice cups make it all straight out of the last writer one would ever associate with Osborne, Denton Welch. Mind you, this sort of thing is always happening to him. He’s able to drop his guard temporarily during a brief (and glorious) stint as a reporter on Gas World, not, one imagines, the most epicene of periodicals, but no sooner does he give up ...”

“... punitive tradition that has linked homosexuality with illness or deformity of one kind or another; Denton Welch, the patiently analytical English miniaturist, devoted to slow descriptions of his surroundings, physically impaired by a cycling accident and frankly homosexual, breathes his close, liberating air all over Mars-Jones’s novel of disability and ...”

“... wry and oblique a talent as Paul Muldoon) of uncomfortable sectarian truths. But McGuckian is like Denton Welch, whose war-diaries make no mention of the war: we can only just make out this century, let alone her own particular time and place. In a recent Muldoon poem which turns his fellow Northern poets into selections from the cheese-board – Heaney ...”

“... Modernist, exactly. It has Elizabeth Bowen and Rosamund Lehmann in it, and Patrick Hamilton, and Denton Welch. The language is rich in period detail, not locked up for best in the china cabinet, but out there among the everyday cups and saucers, working hard: ‘You nit’, ‘Little git’, ‘You darling’; ‘Look here’, ‘Awfully ...”