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What Became of Waring

I can’t remember when I discovered Anthony Powell, but I do know that what caught my attention about his first novel, Afternoon Men (1931), was somebody’s description of it as ‘the party novel to end all party novels’. The young Powell, it turned out, was a party animal whose spiritual home was the Twenties, when art got mixed up with life. Hence his disdain for the Thirties when, as he put it, ‘the artists and good-timers’ gave way to ‘the politicians and the prigs’. And yet the novel of his I return to again and again, What’s Become of Waring, was written in 1938, long after the public’s appetite for frivolity had waned. So although you suspect that his narrator, like Powell himself, is a good-timer at heart, the only party he attends is a low-key affair at the remote south London depot of a dowdy Territorial unit.
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A Certain Idea of France

In 2011 a French popular novelist called Alexandre Jardine was vilified in both Le Figaro and Le Monde for writing that his grandfather was complicit in the crimes of the Vichy regime. Over seventy years after the country’s defeat by Germany, the subject of occupation and collaboration is still a touchy one in France. The war is viewed through the prism of good and evil, collaboration and resistance, de Gaulle and Pétain. This was the narrative needed for France to recover its place at the top table of world nations after the Second World War. Of course the majority of Frenchmen did not fit into this neat analysis: their motivations are unknowable. Some initially collaborated and only later resisted, and almost everyone was compromised in some way.
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Catlike Carrington

Catlike Carrington

On New Year’s Day 1917 Carrington noted in her diary that her portrait of Lytton Strachey was finished; knowing her achievement, she hugged it to herself. ‘I should like to go on always painting you every week, wasting the afternoon loitering, and never, never, showing you what I paint . . .’ Today her loving tribute is on display in the National Portrait Gallery – an exception for this ambitious yet secretive painter, whose work rarely appears in public collections.
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Honourable Rebel

Jessica Mitford found the act of sitting down to write formidably hard. ‘’Tis now 12:30 on the first day I was to really work all day on the book,’ she reported to her husband and daughter in May 1959. ‘As you can see, in spite of the good news I’m as bad as ever – ANYTHING to keep from it.’ The ‘good news’ was that after several attempts to place her book she had finally secured publishing deals in both Britain and the United States. The book in question was a memoir which she wanted at various points to call ‘Red Sheep’ and ‘Revolting Daughters’ but which is known today as Hons and Rebels.
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