Serendipity strikes again. I've been editing a book Handheld will be publishing in September 2023, about Hilda Matheson, who was among many other things a lover of Vita Sackville-West, and the Director of Talks for the BBC from 1926 to 1931, for whom Vita and Harold Nicolson, her husband, did online live broadcasts. BBC Director-General … Continue reading Harold Nicolson, Public Faces
Tag: 1930s
Hadley Freeman, House of Glass
I will read anything Hadley Freeman writes as a journalist, as she is witty, sensible, has a piercing eye for the unnoticed-but-telling observation, and is always entertaining. Her House of Glass is probably the best biography / memoir I've read all year so far. It's the story of Freeman's Jewish grandmother and her family, emigrating/escaping … Continue reading Hadley Freeman, House of Glass
Rupert Hart-Davis, Hugh Walpole
This biography took forever to read. It's dense, in the leisured style of the 1950s (reissued unrevised in the 1980s), and it is very odd to read such a long study of a life that is pretty nearly forgotten now. None of Walpole's novels are in print now, as far as I can see, though … Continue reading Rupert Hart-Davis, Hugh Walpole
Achachlacher, by Emma L Menzies
If you like the gentle narratives about English rural life in the early part of the twentieth century by 'Miss Read', you'll like Achachlacher. It's an epistolary novel about life in the Inner Hebrides, so gentle as to be barely there, and contains hardly anything said in anger, or that might cause controversy. Emma L … Continue reading Achachlacher, by Emma L Menzies
Bertie Wodehouse’s socks and spats
Some years ago I wrote a scholarly chapter on how clothes were used as social indicators in the fiction of P G Wodehouse and Dornford Yates. This was for Middlebrow Wodehouse (ed. Ann Rea), and was a thoroughly enjoyable chapter to research. Costume history is one of my favourite branches of history, and I've been … Continue reading Bertie Wodehouse’s socks and spats
Looking into the gutter: Jean Rhys’ After Leaving Mr Mackenzie
I read After Leaving Mr Mackenzie for #ReadingRhys, but, to be truthful, I really don’t think I would have bothered had it not been for that impetus. I tried Wide Sargasso Sea many years ago and didn’t get on with it at all. I don’t even think I finished it. Jacqui suggested this novel as a … Continue reading Looking into the gutter: Jean Rhys’ After Leaving Mr Mackenzie
Hand me a petrel: Robert Atkinson’s Island-Going
We're in the Outer Hebrides in the 1930s in this Really Like This Book podcasts scripts catch-up, on a mad quixotic journey in the roughest of conditions to locate, observe and tag an obscure little bird called Leach’s fork-tailed petrel. Island-Going by Robert Atkinson is a classic of nature writing, of social history, and of the … Continue reading Hand me a petrel: Robert Atkinson’s Island-Going
Jennifer Morag Henderson, Josephine Tey: A Life
I’ve been waiting for a biography of Josephine Tey for years, and was so pleased when I saw that Sandstone Press were to publish this one. Henderson’s book gives a vast amount of new information (new to the casual but devoted Tey re-reader, but possibly not new to a proper detective fiction scholar), and depicts … Continue reading Jennifer Morag Henderson, Josephine Tey: A Life
E M Delafield’s The Diary of a Provincial Lady
This week on the Really Like This Book's podcast scripts catch-up I’m looking at a total classic, E M Delafield’s The Diary of a Provincial Lady. * This great comic novel from 1930 has never been out of print, and is the quintessential British women’s middlebrow novel from the 1930s. Yet, I’m not sure that many people know … Continue reading E M Delafield’s The Diary of a Provincial Lady
Ngaio Marsh’s Death in a White Tie
This week's classic detective fiction podcast scripts catch-up from Why I Really Like This Book is on the tremendous New Zealand author Ngaio Marsh (pronounced NYE-oh). Death In A White Tie (1938) is from the same period as Sayers’ Murder Must Advertise, and shares a theme of a high society drugs racket with Murder Must Advertise and with Darkness … Continue reading Ngaio Marsh’s Death in a White Tie
Kate Macdonald 