“Bechet — apart from the strength and inspiration of his family background in New Orleans — found most of his early creative inspiration from living…” Sidney Bechet’s superb 1960 autobiography Treat it Gentle, recorded on tape by Joan Williams and Desmond Flower, gives a very personal insight into the life…

“Although Hemingway was, deep down, very proud to have won the Nobel Prize, it was the attention and pressure it brought with it that was not so good, especially after the African air crashes: which created a period of depression…” In October 1954 Ernest Hemingway received notification that he’d been…

A Book about Jazz and Jazz Musicians Back in 1962, when Whitney Balliett’s book, Dinosaurs in the Morning, was first published in the US, Jazz was serious stuff: an important part of life, and not just the musical side of life, but life, in fact it had become — with…

Seen through the pages of John Buchan’s biography of The Lord Protector And in the House of Commons, on the 25th November, 1644, the day after Milton’s polemic, Oliver Cromwell “…set forth mercilessly…” all of Manchester’s short comings: his delays and hesitations, with “…these mistakes…due not to accident or to…

France 1925 After their first, somewhat inglorious, meeting in The Dingo Bar in Paris, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald met again a few days later for lunch at the Closerie des Lilas, where Hemingway said how sorry he was that the booze had hit Scott the way it had…

Plus Agnes Von Kurowsky, Adriana Ivancich, and One or Two Others… Ernest Hemingway was never the serial lover that some writers have suggested. He was a serial marrier for sure. He could certainly charm women and fall in ‘love’ over a couple of drinks. …

One of the almost Forgotten Episodes in Lawrence’s Life In the April of 1919 T. E. Lawrence was heavily involved in the ‘slow grind’ of the Paris Peace Conference, but then he received a telegram from his younger brother stating their father was suffering from pneumonia and that he should…

Plus: Another Great Day at Sea, and White Sands But Beautiful was my introduction to Geoff Dyer, a writer I felt at home with immediately, as I did when I first came across Hemingway and Steinbeck, D. H. Lawrence, and a certain Jan Myrdal, whose Confessions of a Disloyal European…

“There are no human rights under the Russians…” Amir Mohamedi (1986) Doris Lessing was, in 1986, one of the most celebrated and thought-provoking writers of the 20th century, and although she had, by that year, lived in London since 1949, her birth in a famine ridden Iran in 1919, and…