A break with Labour would be a blow to party activists during the
Posted in General on 02. Oct, 2010
A break with Labour would be a blow to party activists during the run-up to the next general election. I ended up imagining him as a superior Edmund Gosse, finger in countless pies, but a much nicer man. Whatever else may be said of him, as Sutherland shows, in profuse and sympathetic detail, no one in recent English literary life tried harder or meant better.D J Taylor’s ‘Orwell the life’ is published by Vintage. On 8 March, Hitler marched into the Rhineland.Spender’s death-bed wish was characteristically modest: “I want a few poems to survive and some memoir of myself as distinct from any group.” In this he succeeded. In 1936, “Christo- pher’s novel was going badly, Tony had made no progress with his army memoirs”, and Stephen was considering abandoning his “book on Communism”.
Adam Wood, a student at Reading, said he would reserve full judgement until later, but was “enjoying it”. Michael from Manchester said that it was much better than he expected. “Will and Hand’s journey” he says, “is moving and funny, and manages to work on various levels”. Angie Legge, a nurse, was even more unequivocally positive: “Wow, what a book!”As the debate progressed, so did the length, and quality, of the contributions. dreamworl2 found the book “irritating and moving in roughly equal measure”. jakers52 loved “the portrayal of young men in their confusion” and “laughed a lot”. And Adam Wood finally delivered his verdict, in an elegant review that would not look at all out of place on these pages.
The 78th response to the book was by bookseller Jane Gadsby, who had just joined the forum and read the whole lot. “This is where book groups succeed,” she said, “because the discussion makes you realise aspects of the book that you either hadn’t picked up on or you simply didn’t understand.”Thank you, Jane and Adam and Michael and Shirley and everyone who has contributed to an increasingly riveting discussion. There have been no death threats yet, no signs of God’s wrath or even indications of his literary taste Perhaps that’s for next month.. On the window sill of Jeanette Winterson’s parlour, there is a framed cartoon. “She’s a feisty dame alright” says one character nervously to another.