Search Results

“... Robert Wyatt​ is one of the last survivors of the 1960s pop music scene in Britain. He has been recording for nearly half a century. He was said to be reckless and unfocused for most of his life, but he’s also the best sort of slow-burner moving along at his own pace. Having gone for it late in the day, he hung on to his ‘tankie’ party card – Communist Party of Great Britain – beyond the call of duty, but only because he’d steered his very own Centurion into a deep thicket, opened the hatch and taken a lengthy breather before deciding the game was up ...”

“... On 23 April 1977 Philip Larkin came to lunch at Barbara Pym’s cottage in Finstock, near Oxford. She and her sister had only been living there a short while, after Pym’s retirement from her post in Fetter Lane as assistant editor of Africa; and it was Larkin’s first and, as it turned out, his only visit. After her years in the wilderness, Pym’s novel Quartet in Autumn had at last been accepted for publication: Larkin and David Cecil had independently named her as their choice of ‘most undervalued writer’ in the 75th-anniversary number of the TLS ...”

“... then I can start again being drearily splendid.’ Ten days later she records that she and Honor Wyatt (then in the process of getting divorced from Glover) ‘decided that the burden and continual strain of being “splendid” was sometimes unbearable – sometimes something snaps’. The majority of Barbara Pym’s novels ostensibly avert their ...”

“... When the police break in and find the bodies, a bag of heroin and a blood-stained Medal of Honor, an all too appropriate song by The Doors happens to be playing on Mrs Baggit’s radio – ‘This is the end, my only friend, the end ...’ War stories are normally told by survivors about others – friends or enemies – who didn’t make it. Often the ...”

“... himself to any great extent with the kind of question explored with much sensitivity by Bertram Wyatt-Brown in Southern Honor. Other studies and interpretations will come, but they will have to come from other directions. Professor Foner’s achievement is, in a sense, to have fulfilled the ‘Second ...”