The Children’s Hospital
(C. Adrian) O you lovely book! From the first, gasping, rolling hurtling minutes, through the green fire and the black death to the final sad biblical parade, I love all of your pages.
Continue Reading →The Browning Version
(Terence Rattigan) Rattigan liked to focus on the pitiless pitied; still, he had a great (though now out of fashion) talent for structure, style, character and conventional exposition. It is what makes his plays so enjoyable. Andrew Crocker-Harris is Mr Chipping without the charm, Mr Kotter without the humour and Miss Brodie without the balls. He has been played by Eric Portman, Michael Redgrave, Albert Finney and others but few have got his essential character entirely right (NB the Varnished Culture never saw Portman in the role). After all, the impression he gives is that of only mild surprise at…
Continue Reading →The Masters
(by C. P. Snow) Snow wrote about what he knew: machinations at Oxbridge and Westminster. This one, the 4th in a loose sequence of 9 novels known as Strangers and Brothers, is perhaps the best, a somewhat pompous but intriguing deconstruction of a college election which humanises the Dons and explains the politics.
Continue Reading →Provence and the Côte D’Azur
(by J McCulloch) The South of France may have slipped down the rankings of getaways for the great and good but it is still a superb region in which to luxuriate. This beautiful guide is not only packed with information; it is packed with the right information, first-hand and canny and laced with photos that are almost better than being there.
Continue Reading →The Sheltering Sky
(Paul Bowles) We cannot in this instance agree with the Big V’s view that this book is “an utterly ridiculous performance, devoid of talent.”[1] Bowles did admire Nabokov and his reaction to this verdict upon his most famous book makes for nice speculation. But then, VN was never a fan of the existentialists. Port and Kit Moresby try a Saharan trek to salvage their loveless marriage and end up destroyed by kif, heat, sexual assault, typhoid and catatonia, a fairly accurate reflection (death from typhoid aside) of the real life of Paul and Jane Bowles. Appalling experiences related in commonplace…
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