The Art of Ernest Hemingway — John Atkins
“ At the time I wrote there was only one other critical work on Hemingway…” John Atkins
Atkins wrote The Art of Ernest Hemingway in 1952, and my copy (published by Spring Books in 1964) has an excellent updated preface by the…
“ Dear Sir Edward, This is from my cottage and we have just been playing your 2nd Symphony…”
T. E. Lawrence’s love of music is self evident when you read accounts by others of the time they spent in his company. One such account is by Flight-Lieutenant R. G. Sims…
And the subject of a new play
When we moved to Lancashire last year we began searching for a place of worship which, after a couple of months, turned out to be St. Michael and All Angels Church in the village of Hoole, just a few miles along the road…
“ In August 1928 I sent him proofs of Robert Graves’ Lawrence and the Arabs. He wrote from India: ‘The Graves book puzzles me. I do not like the long passages in which he turns Revolt in the Desert into sober prose…”
The name Jonathan Cape has been synonymous with…
“…a pane of glass went and the bullet smashed into the row of bottles on the show-case wall to the right.”
Many readers today may think the thriller, as a genre, has been around for a long time when, in my opinion, it’s only really been around since 1937 (which…
“ Whitman always spent a great deal of time in their lavatory…”
In his superb 1989 autobiography, Words Through A Window Pane, the English writer Michael Meyer takes the reader on several literary journeys back in time — in the manner of the hand that shook the hand, which can…
Ernest Hemingway, Dylan Thomas, D. H. Lawrence & Others
My discovery of Ernest Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence, and Dylan Thomas, came about as a result of a new English teacher — a fresh-faced young Welshman called Mr Jones — who, in 1960, had been parachuted into Hugh Clopton Secondary Modern…
The Benny Goodman Carnegie Hall Concert of 1938
On a cold and wet Sunday night in January 1938 the Benny Goodman Orchestra — and a few very illustrious guests such as Count Basie, Lester Young and Buck Clayton — played Carnegie Hall in New York.
They were the first jazz…
The Inventor of Jazz
Ferdinand Joseph Morton was born in New Orleans in 1885, and at a very young age was knocking out a tune or two on any instruments he could get his hands on, and teaching himself the rudiments of music:
At the age of seven, I was…
A Short Story
The snow lay deep and crisp and even. In fact it wasn’t that deep, or crisp, and after the morning’s shelling by a couple of German 88s it was very uneven indeed, and in places, many places, still crimson from the battering the US 4th Infantry Division…
