Fellows Of The Royal Society Of Literature

"... each page breathes a kind of magic, a sigh of enchantment that’s hard to capture in a short review. Somehow, Tremain has imbued her 16th novel with the freshness – and the intense bitter-sweetness – of a first book of the very best kind. Its themes of adolescence and betrayal, high style and evocation of period, remind me of Françoise Sagan’s equally slim ', though its particular also sets it apart from that book. And while the young Marianne lives in semi-rural Berkshire, and likes horses more than most human beings – the novel’s horsey sections will perhaps seem peculiar to readers who didn’t grow up on Anna Sewell or – its author’s careful delineation of her parents’ brittle, golf-club ways recalls Julian Barnes’s suburban-set . The details are exquisite. Here are bath cubes, and , and sauces made from marmalade to go with baked ham ..."

"When a language creates – as it does – a community within the present, it does so only by courtesy of a community between the present and the past."

"Inerrancy about one's own powers is not a mark of the Victorian poets, nor even is a simple prudence about not over-reaching or over-archaizing. The Victorian poetaster over 'weens'."

"Give history to children in the form of lists of dates or lumps of data and they won’t respond to it at all, but give them an image King Charles II, say, , or a defeated Napoleon staring out at an empty ocean from the cliffs of ) and this could be something which might move and inspire them."

"Great Britain was Victorian for two-thirds of a century. Things changed and counterchanged; even the Queen often proved a surprise, though it may be thought that she was a surprise like a Browning character, by being even more herself than one would ever have anticipated."

"Taste, discretion, and decision have, one likes to think, been exercised so as to manifest the variety of an age's poems, the felicitous heterogeneity, the diverting diversity, and the buoyant resistance which a world of poems will always put up even to the best literary historian's summary justice."

"Eccentricity has not always been encouraged by the prim editors of . Invited to list his recreations, omitted motorbikes and wrote instead: , and tennis. Identifying himself as of provided a greater source of satisfaction."

"In 1928 Edmund Blunden's ' was widely praised for its lyrical, approach. Sassoon's ', also published in 1928, set the scene for the contrast between an idyllic, pre-war world and the savagery of war explored in his ."

"The , constructed from rosy bricks and crowned with curved stone s, stands among the meadows flanking the , in the middle of England, a hundred s to the north of London. Starting life as a modest built in the , it was enlarged twice. An ambitious owner redesigned it in the , to incorporate a large carved staircase and a grand reception room on an upper floor. In the 1820s, the House gained a courtyard, a library and a lake. The estate, easily encompassed by an hour's brisk walk, is surprisingly varied in its landscape, incorporating traces of an and a trading post."

"Arthur Benson, one of the coterie of clever, literary-minded younger men whose company the ageing novelist relished, found himself incapable of sharing the enthusiasm of and for ."

"Usually dismissive of other female writers, Riding had praised Stein in the final chapter of A Survey of Modernist Poetry for using a language of divine ordinariness. It was 's idea that they should invite Miss Stein to publish something with the ."

"Today, the most famous scene from Mary's life and, perhaps, in is the stormy summer night at the on when Byron, his handsome young doctor , the Shelleys and , who was carrying Byron's child, decided to write for fun. This was the night on which Frankenstein, that best known of all Romantic works, was born. Its author was not yet nineteen. Frankenstein has become part of our lives."

"Julia Blackburn, who lives in , became interested in in the wake of her husband ’s death in 2013. Makkink was a Dutch artist (he made the sinister phallic murder weapon in ), and there was something magnetic about the idea of this vanished territory that had once connected their two homelands. A magpie anyway, eyes to the ground, always turning up oddities, she’d become fascinated by the immense age of the worked flints and fossilised bones she kept finding in the eroding cliffs of beach, a place where “things … often appear magically out of nowhere and then vanish with an equal magic”."

"The author’s father, , was “a poet and an alcoholic”; her mother, Rosalie de Meric, a painter and an exhibitionist. Both parents were breathtaking narcissists and dirty fighters. Until they divorced, when Julia was 13, they scrapped loudly and vigorously. Rosalie would often thrust Julia in front of her to act as a shield from her husband’s fists. Once a punch missed and hit the child. “So sorry darling,” Thomas said. “No blood I hope?”"

"The poet and critic Bernard Bergonzi, who has died aged 87, was long associated with the teaching of 20th-century English literature at . His books shed new light on the English writing of the first world war and the 1930s, and on developments in criticism since the 60s, which he largely disliked. Monographs on HG Wells, TS Eliot, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Arnold and Graham Greene showed Bergonzi at his sensible and lucid best."

"In 1812, when he was retreating from the blood and confusion of Moscow and the disastrous , Napoleon had remarked that there was only a single step separating the sublime from the ridiculous. From moment that he was deposited on , until the day when his body was finally removed from the island twenty-five years later, the sublime and the ridiculous were often so closely intertwined that it was impossible to separate the one from the other. The servants and companions who were with him on the island still treated him with all the fear and respect that was owing to an , but the more they bobbed and bowed in Napoleon's presence and tried to maintain the illusion of , the more rigidly they need to shut out any mirror reflection of what they were doing and how they looked while they were doing it."

"The s whom we admire to-day do not appear to love their s, and the s who appraise their books show no signs of doing so either. For a writer or critic to show delight in a character would would seem to-day rather naïve, an old-fashioned response left over from the days of Dickens and Surtees. Characters, it seems, are no longer objects of affection."

"Arnold Rattenbury was too young to be very active in the , but in the early he was friendly with several older Communist writers who had been. ... Although I make limiting judgements on Auden in the following pages, his centrality in the seems to me unmistakable. Unlike other hostile critics of 'orthodoxy', Mr Rattenbury does give a hostage to fortune by proposing an alternative."

"In order to try to see what Goya saw, I have visited the places he knew well: the village of his childhood, the farmhouse where he stayed with the , the cities of , Madrid, and, finally, . In my mind's eye I can look across the landscapes that he once travelled through. I can walk the same streets, I can gaze out of the window of the house in which he was born and the house in which he died. Maybe that is another way of meeting a a man who died."

"Of course, was an eccentric, and his life story reads like something invented by Edgar Allan Poe with a certain amount of help from Richard Jefferies, but we have always needed the eccentrics to point the way. It was Waterton who warned the Americans, for example, of the ultimate cost of their profligate destruction of their forests. It was Waterton who fought against the beginnings of pollution in the Industrial Revolution. It was he who turned the grounds of into a , even maintaining trees with holes in them in which birds could nest and building a special bank for s."

"Glendinning's biography is unusual in including almost as much about Raffles's relatives and friends as about him. This is as it should be, as they were crucial to his career as well as to his happiness; especially his two wives, the vivacious , who died in 1814, and then the strong and resourceful , who bore him his children, and fanned his reputation, and her own, after Raffles's death."

"As Wells insists, many of Verne's inventions have materialized since his time. travel is a commonplace, and the circumnavigation of the moon is more than a possibility. Well's imaginings, however, remain as unattainable now as when he wrote: no one has yet contrived to travel through time, or ; we are still unable to , nor can we ."

"He cannot be seen as an Enlightenment figure. What we think of as eighteenth-century, in terms of architecture, furniture, painting and the decorative arts, came mostly after his heyday. He died in 1745 and was isolated by deafness and dementia from the late 1730s."

"In 1920, , Edith, and Helen Rootham instituted the Anglo-French Poetry Society, largely as a platform for Mrs. Bennett's recitations."

"With his wife, he founded the . He had no idea when he married Virginia Stephen how her mental instability would determine and distort his own trajectory, nor that she would become one of the most famous English authors of the twentieth century. He knew how to love, and she was the love of his life. After came change and a . In his last decade, five volumes of autobiography won him respect and recognition. He left not only distinguished books on international relations, but also satirical squibs, a great mass of literary and political journalism, a play, poetry, short stories, and two novels."

"No writer played less to the gallery. Often shy, she could nevertheless tell marvellously funny stories about Thomas Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Edith Wharton or the fastidious Huxleys in India, offered a meal of chocolates, ice cream, dumplings stuffed with curried mice. One remembers a sturdy, trousered figure, bright blue eyes, effective and observant, the clipped voice quickening at an ungenerous remark or deference to some fashionable fraud. Always she treasured "that sense of lighter heart, deep-grooved pleasures, daylight and proportion". Her memoir, Quicksands (2005), revived interest in the writer, and her elegant, insightful work."

"The descendants of the sleeping on the pavements of are paupers. We speak of poverty as being abject, extreme, dire, genteel; crippling, unmitigated, relative. It can be all of these, but it is always the last."

"By about 1900 BC, successive invaders, notably from Spain, were ousting Stone Age rulers and bringing Britain into the Mediterranean trade orbit. Sophisticated engineers erected , the , the 20,000 s and smaller stone circles signalling to a sky thick with gods."

"The letters to are Bowen's "writing" in the same way as her books and stories are. Readers of her fiction will find echoes and resonances. She told him with great freedom about how she writes, when she writes, what it feels like to be writing. When, late in life, she started on The Little Girls, she shared the process of creation with him as never before — even though The Heat of the Day, about love and betrayal in London during the war, is dedicated "To Charles Ritchie". If these were only love-letters, they would not be so valuable or extraordinary. Bowen is a natural and practised story-teller with a genius for evoking atmosphere. She can be wonderfully funny as well as deadly serious as she regales Ritchie with the minutiae of her life, whether in Ireland, England, Europe or America. She spills out, without inhibition, her opinions and prejudices."

"It was at , and then at , that Georgina's literary career took wing. In 1943 her Charlotte Mary Yonge: the Story of an Uneventful Life was published. 's reputation as a writer was then at its nadir, and Georgina's book provoked a savage and contemptuous review by Mrs , but it was greeted with joy by a wide, though secret band of fans throughout the country, and led to a revival in Charlotte Yonge studies in university English literature departments, and to the foundation, a few years later, of the Charlotte Mary Yonge Society, an elite group of writers such as , and ."

"Considerable difficulties, however, beset the way of 's biographer. Her life was so much bound up with her husband's career that to write an orthodox biography would merely be to repeat the story which has already been told with such fullness and brilliance by and ."

"Lyra Innocentium was much valued by the devout, but it never attained to the world-wide popularity of ', and in some quarters it gave positive offence. ... Keble's chief reason for publishing Lyra Innocentium was his desire to raise money for the rebuilding of Hursley Church."

"was always to attribute depression to ill-health or, when she was much older, to the prevailing east wind. She never assumed it was a facet of her temperament or that her life could reasonably cause it."

"'s letters to Ray give a very good idea of her literary influences. These were definitely not her mother's her favorites (Hardy, ', Gissing) and Elizabeth has grown out of Dostoevsky, dislikes Dickens, finds Lawrence a 'bloody crosspatch' and thinks Katherine Mansfield moaned too much. 'It is easy to see who is behind me: Jane Austen & Chekhov & EM Forster & Virginia Woolf. ...' ... Other important writers for her were Sterne (for his relationship to the reader), Richardson and Fielding. Above all she revered Jane Austen and Turgenev."

"A picnic is the Englishman's grand gesture ..."

"... today even our s are presented at a Garden Court, followed by a more or less picnic on the lawn. All classes and ranks share in this taste ..."

"It’s possible, these days, to think of E. M. Forster's cultural role as the providing of stories for to make into pretty movies. For people who think that way, Nicola Beauman's new biography will be a useful corrective. Here, in a book of modest length (at last, a biography that is not longer than its subject's collected works!), is what every general reader should know about Forster's life and contacts."

"' ... had been earning its advance, and Aldous was being paid royalties. The book sold 2,500 copies in the first year and 86 the year after. (', Scott Fitzgerald's first novel published the year before, sold forty-five thousand.) Cash in hand, Aldous enrolled Suzanne in an art course he had seen advertised in '."

"The were delighted to accept a new god, but reluctant to relinquish many of the old ones."

"Sybille Bedford is the most sensual of writers. No one writes as she does about the smells and colours of the , about the pleasure of food and wine, or — in contrast — about the overstuffed house of a solid Jewish family in Berlin at the turn of the 20th century. A short paragraph of hers can expand in the reader's mind into a hinterland of suggestion and sensation. However does she do it? She says in Quicksands that she took a lesson from Ernest Hemingway's remark that "all you have to do is to write one true sentence, and then go on from there"."

"War was justified, especially if the foe was weakly armed, and, preferably, coloured. Beautiful women asserted themselves through romantic bitchiness (which left men very stricken or very bored), through espionage, leading to sudden death in exotic circumstances, or through hunting: 'Gad, George, she keeps her seat like a man, damme, she does.'"

"Peter Vansittart, who has died aged 88, was a master of the historical novel and a writer of outstanding talent. He wrote more than 40 books, which also encompassed anthologies, works on literature and . As he was the first to concede, the reading public could be slow to enjoy his novels. He put this down to his “obsession with language and speculation at the expense of narrative, however much I relish narrative in others”. Nonetheless, he was admired by critics and fellow authors. To , he was “a master of description”, and to , “a carefully accurate historian [and] a splendidly imaginative writer of fiction”."

"It was the patrician in Vita that first fascinated Mrs Woolf. The aristocratic manner, she noted, was like an actress's ..."

"and , the principal family historians, both wrote that it was Mr Trollope's idea that should go to America. They may have been fudging the real issues here, just as they fudged the long association of Mrs Trollope with ."

"Carey is extremely well read, and uses his impressive knowledge to point out some of the sillinesses of writers, such as in their attacks on "tinned food" and cremation as possible causes for the decline of British civilization. He is a healthy questioner of received opinions. It forces one to rethink one's preconceptions."

"As an element in the reaction against mass values the intellectuals brought into being the theory of the avant-garde, according to which the mass is, in art and literature, always wrong. What is truly meritorious in art is seen as the prerogative of a minority, the intellectuals, and the significance of this minority is reckoned to be directly proportionate to its ability to outrage and puzzle the mass. Though it usually purports to be progressive, the avant-garde is consequently always reactionary. That is, it seeks to take literacy and culture away from the masses, and so to counteract the progressive intentions of democratic educational reform."

"Carey argued that the intelligentsia was driven to create literary modernism by a profound loathing of ordinary common readers. The intellectuals feared the masses not because they were illiterate but because, by the early twentieth century, they were becoming more literate, thanks to public education, adult education, scholarships, and cheap editions of the great books. If more and more working people were reading the classics, if they were closing the cultural gap between themselves and the middle classes, how could intellectuals preserve their elite status as arbiters of taste and custodians of rare knowledge? They had to create a new body of modernist literature which was deliberately made so difficult and obscure that the average reader could not understand it."

"With the 1927 publication of In Search of England, H. V. Morton began to establish his name as the most popular travel writer in Britain. Part of Morton's appeal, particularly to the lower middle class, was that he engagingly interwove human interest accounts of his journeys with potted historical and literary vignettes to convey the sense of an enjoyable holiday. Yet beyond these seemingly casual aspects lay serious ideological purposes, and these are of importance in exploring interwar views on . Morton insisted that the nations's strength ultimately depended on the health of its rural areas. Yet the urban and industrial revolutions had inflicted fundamental damage on the fabric of the nation. Morton called for renewed recognition of the central continuities, especially , in ."

"What appeals to me about Morton's work is that you are reading two histories at once. As he recounts stories of the and eras, he is also giving a contemporary account of a world that has entirely vanished. He writes with a crisp matter-of-factness about his faith and his place as an Englishman abroad in the 1930s. I don't mean in a colonially superior way, but just with a certainty that I think few could express today. In the book he is mostly exploring the youthful nation state of 's . For Morton, visiting what remains of the places where stayed is often a case of begging a ride from a local. It is still an age when traveling in the near East is more an expedition than a holiday. When Morton visits the site of the for example, it is a waterlogged ruin, where he imagines the frogs to be croaking out her name. A plate image in the book shows a desolate empty location, and he laments the mutilated statues on the road from the village of ."

"Shakespeare's London was a small walled town whose gates were shut each night with the coming of darkness. His contemporaries went a-Maying and gathering s where now are tramcars and gasometers. A Londoner was to Shakespeare a man who was born probably within sound of , who worked and slept within the ancient town wall of London, and would probably die there and be buried in one of the city churchyards. London three centuries ago was a small comprehensible cathedral city standing behind its wall, and its citizens could look at it and walk all round it, as men can walk round and . A mile or so away was the royal , where the King lived. There were two ways to it, one by river and the other along the strand of the . To the north of the were meadows and hedges, a , a and more fields stretching up to a rural lane that led to and was to become known by the odd name of ."