Search Results

“... In Godfrey; A Special Time Remembered Jill Bennett tells how she braved the sacred portals of the Garrick Club to continue a row with her lover Godfrey Tearle, how the old actor came down a flight of stairs two at a time absolutely furious, how he took hold of her wrist, sat down and, putting her across his knee, spanked the living daylights out of her ...”

“... Bloomsbury. The play’s greatest virtue is that it does not seem like mine. Rachel Roberts and Jill Bennett go off to lunch together to compare notes on their various husbands. They are like old-fashioned stars, both in expensive fur coats, and, when together, sly and mischievous and in league against men. Lindsay has no false pride. He will consider ...”

“... the actors, Lindsay had the table jacked up 18 inches on the actual take so that Rachel Roberts, Jill Bennett and Co found themselves trying to behave normally although the dining-table was practically under their chins. On the other hand, as with the Royal Family, it did have to be his fun. He had no time for the occasional giggles and private jokes ...”

“... and of not knowing how a writer works because she is not a proper writer herself. The actress Jill Bennett arrives on the scene. Osborne doesn’t like her much – but why should that impede his career as what he likes to call a ‘cocksman’? Here the reader’s mind may go back to A Better Class of Person. Early in his acting career Osborne ...”

“... jacket, aged to look as if he’d inherited it from his father). As his fourth marriage (to Jill Bennett) fell apart, so did his writing career: from A Sense of Detachment (1972) on, his plays were neither critically nor commercially successful. Plagued by illness, and known increasingly for his blimpish opinions rather than his plays, Osborne’s ...”

“... is to write your own script in the most literal sense. ‘The Old Crowd’ – which Alan Bennett writes about in the piece preceding this – is set in the near-future, when law and order are disintegrating; the house, too, is crumbling, with cracks appearing in the ceilings. One of the old crowd, Totty, hasn’t been able to make it to the party ...”

“... starting with ‘John Stallworthy d. 1744 and Ann d. 1771’ and running to ‘Jon b. 1935 and Jill b. 1938’ and the new generation, ‘Jonathan, Pippa and Nicolas’.) His father was a surgeon who settled down to a practice in Oxford. His mother was a housewife with a gift for music and a good ear for poems. Or for rhymes: she schooled her son on ...”

“... is more likely to mislead if it reinforces the popular idea of a Hitler cult among women. Jill Stephenson, writing in the collection of essays edited by Peter Stachura, disposes effectively of what one recent writer has called ‘the sacrificial willingness of women to be Hitler’s devotees’. The complex and changing position of women in the Third ...”

“... in good order on the sterling old tradition of the heart being in the right place, as in Arnold Bennett and J.B. Priestley, and it moves rather close to John Wain’s posthumous novel, in his Bildungsroman series about a young man growing up in Oxford – a trifle ironical in view of Amis’s strongly-expressed disdain for Wain’s mode and temper of ...”

“... but made a strong early showing as the ranking literary man, publishing The North Ship (1945), Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter (1947) before he was 26. Amis seems to have taken this in his stride, being more absorbed by the many sexual opportunities that came his way even as a junior academic. Larkin got on well with Amis’s first wife, Hilly ...”

“... of which it grew are painful. Nearly 20 years ago the poet allowed an Australian academic, Bruce Bennett, to publish details of the events behind it in Spirit in Exile. In the 1950s Jannice Henry, an 18-year-old doctor’s daughter from Surrey, fell in love with her father’s locum, Neil Micklem. Their affair lasted for years; Jannice hoped it would end in ...”

“... intensity in his own best novels; Gavin Ewart’s affectionate ode is almost ideally deft; Alan Bennett’s implacably wary set – piece (‘Why not something more along the lines of a biscuit barrel?’) makes one laugh a good deal more, or more festively, than most festschrift items do. In short, Larkin at Sixty gets a lot of different kinds of ...”