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 Extract from Chapter 11 | A Sort of Life

 Extract from Chapter 11 | A Sort of Life

The Man Within was, it is true, the third novel I had completed, but the first two had been clumsy exercises. I had been in training only, and there still remained other possibilities – British-American Tobacco or the Lancashire General Insurance Company. With all its faults of sentimentality and over-writing The Man Within was professional. I found myself committed to the long-distance race. I sometimes find myself wishing that, before starting the second novel, The Name of Action, I had found an experienced mentor.
Hats Off to P. D. James

Hats Off to P. D. James

About six months ago I embarked on the entirely pleasurable project of rereading P. D. James’s fourteen Adam Dalgliesh novels in order. I first discovered P. D. James in the summer of 1997 when, as a teen age employee of the Edinburgh Book Festival, I was assigned to take tickets for an event at which she was promoting that year’s novel, A Certain Justice. To my surprise my scholarly lawyer grandfather appeared in the queue filing into the marquee. Afterwards I filched his newly signed copy before he could read it and then began to work my way through the back catalogue in fairly haphazard order.
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Village Voices

Village Voices

The village of Ulverton, somewhere on the chalk downland of the Wiltshire‒Berkshire border, is one of the most real imagined places I know. When I first visited it in the pages of Adam Thorpe’s eponymous book, published in 1992, I passed through too quickly. Aged 19, at university and having a reading list set each week, I saw books as a challenge. The faster I could read one, the better. This extended to the reading I did in my spare time. I rushed through Ulverton’s pages in the same way many people drive through an English village today: too fast, with all the resultant blurred vision and fragmentary impressions.
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Travelling for Kicks

Travelling for Kicks

‘Do chorus girls think?’ asked the headline of a newspaper article that appeared around the time that Constance Tomkinson won a spot in her first chorus line. As one soon discovers from her gloriously comical Les Girls (1956), they not only thought but were experts in navigating the rackety worlds of show business, finance and sex while defending their virtue as energetically as a Samuel Richardson heroine. Not that a spot in a chorus line was Constance’s goal when she started out in show business. Born the daughter of a Canadian Nonconformist minister, she headed to New York in 1933 at the age of 18, hoping to become ‘the Toast of Broadway’. Instead, she joined the mass of unemployed actors turned away from countless casting calls. She and a friend toured churches around the East Coast per forming Biblical dramas for a few months, but then the friend quit, declaring: ‘I’ve had enough of pulling curtains with one hand and playing God with the other.’
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Pure Magic

Pure Magic

‘I have laughed at White’s great Arthurian novel and cried over it and loved it all my life,’ wrote Ursula Le Guin of the tetralogy of novels by T. H. White now known as The Once and Future King. She encapsulates not only what’s so ravishing and so distinctive about it – its jagged blend of pathos and humour – but also the way in which White’s eccentric riff on Malory’s Morte d’Arthur can speak to children and grown-ups, in different voices, over the course of a whole life.
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