Search Results

“... who ‘was smaller in stature’. Now I come to think of it, though, that might interest an alien. Francis King, in his autobiography Yesterday Came Suddenly, writes as straightforwardly as he has always done. Every so often in the course of his long career as a novelist critics have spoken of the detachment of his style, nearly all of them meaning it as ...”

“... between Ackerley and his sister: about that only, since Nancy is granted no independent life. (Francis King does his best to supply her with one in his accommodating introduction.) Given that Ackerley could unquestionably write, his perverse refusal to make real the husband of Nancy, or her son, has to be evidence that it was his own flesh only that ...”

“... drawings and paintings – and commissioned photographs. Some of the most powerful were by David King. He used to come blazing into the office with his huge black-and-white portraits, already measured up for size: no question, ever, of anything being cropped. One was of the writer Francis Wyndham, then in his sixties, in ...”

“... read every book in the world. His head must be dizzy with the minor works of Julian Mitchell and Francis King and Brian Patten and Maureen Duffy. His sleep must have been poisoned for years by worries about properly dating Piers Paul Read’s A Married Man. It is, in fact, a disaster to fill a book like this with storms of names and endless ...”

“... and writer for children, has been singled out for praise by critics as diverse as Philip Toynbee, Francis King, Angus Wilson and Andrew Sinclair. All feel that he lacks the large audience he deserves. Yet the curious reader, anxious to gain more information about this somewhat enigmatic writer, of undoubted power (and above all vision), may easily find ...”

“... To Francis Stuart on his 95th Birthday You – on a Friday evening in Dublin At the curtain of the 20th century – Dare me to be a child again: ‘Imagine being Dostoevsky ... ’ (Pause) ‘Or a gnat.’ Lucky me To be sitting in the company of a dead man. How many years ago is it since you died? You have always been a cat but since your death A before-only-sniffed-at flexibility buzzes your fuzz Entitling you to enlighten me in the evolution of flight – To give me a gnat’s eye glimpse of the cosmos And of Russian fiction – the last word in death ...”

“... to Chhokrapur. Chhatarpur was visited not only by the latest literary Trevelyan but by Francis King and Diana Petre, respectively literary executor and half-sister of Ackerley. Was this mass descent really a good idea? The whiff of scandal had subsided somewhat, but there was understandable apprehension as to how the visitors would be ...”

“... diction. The first of the 47 fictions in James Kelman’s Greyhound for Breakfast finds old Francis on a park bench in Glasgow, menaced by vaguely circling winos trying to cadge a cigarette. It was downright fucking nonsensical. And yet it was the sort of incident you could credit. You were sitting down in an attempt to recover a certain equilibrium ...”

“... and let it all hang out so far you gotta pump air into it. Click. Click. Take infinity! … Crown King Thing. The aura bomb has been detonated. Our energy is continuous and immortal … And so on – when he hits this vein, Heathcote can keep it up indefinitely. But in his best work – The Speakers, and four of his plays – the whimsical gift of the gab is ...”

“... too single, the dramatic images miss their mark. ‘What, into this?’ The words are those of the king of infinite space up against his nutshell, the ‘etherial spirit of man’ as Carlyle put it, up against ‘two or three feet of sorry tripe full of–’, the voice of whatever it is in us which in love, in religion and in ill health, sees itself as ...”

“... centres on a middle-aged Polish couple whose son has recently committed suicide. Jane Gardam and Francis King are chilling and precise enough in observation to carry off banal-looking themes; Gardam’s tale of imminent Oxbridge entrance and the comparison of A-level grades in leafy Wimbledon has a startling sub-text of myth and cosmic ...”

“... Trying​ to describe the spectacular summit meeting between Henry VIII and Francis I which took place in June 1520, contemporaries fell into a kind of stupor. It was the eighth wonder of the world, said one. Another thought the temporary palaces – erected at staggering expense for the sole purpose of a fortnight’s worth of jousts and junketing – outdid the ‘miracles of the Egyptian pyramids and the Roman amphitheatres ...”

“... and helplessness of leadership’. Most, however, fulfilled the role demanded of them by the demon king of this pantomime, Palme Dutt. Dutt dominates and controls these proceedings with a Catoesque monomania and a forensically inflexible vocabulary. As David Edgar has pointed out, Dutt is the one person in the whole drama who takes exactly the same line at the ...”

“... allow friends to speak for themselves. What they have to say is far from fulsome. According to Francis King, she was ‘a great character’, but ‘not, emphatically, not a nice character’. Elisabeth Lutyens talks of her ‘childishly screaming for attention’. Stalwart chums resented her endless cadging of car rides – one proposed writing an ...”

“... should drive a man to child abuse, so I am delighted to find the Burma excuse put to flight by Francis King, a school contemporary of Trench’s. He remembers Trench the schoolboy as ‘supercilious, capricious and cruel’ long before the Japanese ever laid a finger on him. Mark Peel describes the floggings at Shrewsbury as ‘a real outlet for ...”