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“... It can sometimes seem that the Second World War never stopped. Stephen Spender alluded recently in the London Review to the idea that it was simply a continuation of the First, but the ‘Thirty Years’ War’ view of 20th-century history has in turn to accommodate some of the later continuities of which one is reminded by both Mordecai Richler’s anthology and Ernestine Schlant and Thomas Rimer’s collection of essays ...”

“... A great many novels nowadays are just travel books,’ Ivy Compton-Burnett grumbled to Barbara Pym in 1960. ‘Olivia has just published one about Bulgaria.’ She hadn’t noticed that the setting of The Great Fortune is in fact Romania. But she had a point. Journeys, voluntary and enforced, are big in Olivia Manning’s work, as they had been in the first forty years of her life, and the painter manqué in her always made the most of topographical detail ...”

“... are no more than pious mouthings; who, really, wants to read an authorised biography? So take Jeremy Treglown’s apologia at the beginning of his Dahl biography with a pinch of salt. Ophelia Dahl plans to write the authorised version of her father’s life, with the approval of his second wife, Felicity, who asked friends and relatives not to ...”

“... It is this knot that the essay attempts to loosen. The major individuating trait that Jeremy Treglown isolates is Rochester’s contempt for the show of toil or effort, and he neatly demonstrates that the same passion for the appearance of ease is what Rochester sought in manners, friendship, sex, erudition and negligent reference, as well as ...”

“... The present moment’s all my lot, And that, as fast as it is got,  Phyllis, is wholly thine. Mr Treglown shows the dependence of this poem on Hobbes’s ideas; it is not the sort of thing the average seducer wastes his time on. Dying, almost certainly of VD, at the age of 33, Rochester – extravagant to the last – was spectacularly converted to ...”

“... Henry Green put in an incongruous cameo appearance in Jeremy Treglown’s 1994 biography of Roald Dahl. When an interviewer from the Houston Post asked the bestselling author of the low-life and hilarious ‘adult’ short-story collection Someone like You who his favourite British writer was, he answered loftily: ‘Henry Green ...”

“... the neat way in which these two remarks frame the collection of Pritchett’s essays belongs to Jeremy Treglown. In a move that exemplifies the imaginative sympathy informing this acute and shapely biography, Treglown juxtaposes the observation with a remark from one of Pritchett’s letters to his friend Gerald ...”

“... 20 November, the date of Franco’s death, and it is the site of continual unease and controversy. Jeremy Treglown’s book Franco’s Crypt is a patchwork of reportage, literary criticism and commentary on art and culture under the dictatorship and historical memory of the period. Treglown visited the Valley of the ...”

“... Andrei Voznesensky, head of the Writers’ Union. It turns out that the other English guest is Jeremy Treglown, the editor of the Times Literary Supplement. Josephine Pasternak, the poet’s only surviving sister, and Sir Isaiah Berlin were to have been the first team, we later learn. But even as substitutes, we have everything made easy. We supply ...”

“... and excellently produced paperback edition (part of a projected reissue of all Green’s fiction), Jeremy Treglown reminds us that Loving is contemporary with Brideshead Revisited. Green and Waugh exchanged grudging letters on the two books; Waugh’s strictures on Green’s ungentlemanly usages are richly absurd, given their respective social ...”

“... of literary reviewing is a principal subject in an interesting collection of essays edited by Jeremy Treglown and Bridget Bennett.† My attention wandering, I found myself trying to remember how I started to do literary journalism. The first book I was ever asked to review, let us say fifty years ago, was a study of Fair Rosamond, the mistress of ...”

“... at a safe distance, by seeking to write everything from the eyrie of objective fact – as Jeremy Treglown does very effectively in his biographies of Henry Green and V.S. Pritchett, as Rosemary Hill does in her magical biography of Pugin – but to me a lively new aspect of the form is to be found in the work of those who involve themselves most ...”

“... it adds little to the very good duo of earlier Dahlographies, the first unofficial one by Jeremy Treglown (who busted many of Dahl’s many self-mythologisations) and the huge ‘official’ one by Donald Sturrock, which, while seeking to bring out the best in Dahl, doesn’t conceal his self-aggrandising side.Through the mid-1960s Dahl wrote ...”