• About
  • Index
  • The Lost Domain

Through the dark labyrinth

Through the dark labyrinth

Tag Archives: Evelyn Waugh

Desperate fun

24 Tuesday Jan 2023

Posted by Paul Kincaid in books

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Evelyn Waugh, Kate Atkinson

I am wary of doing this. It seemed like a good idea last year. I would write a blog post about every book I read, which didn’t seem especially difficult or problematic. And, indeed, it started well; I kept up with the project until well into March. But then, in March, things fell apart. No, I don’t think there is a connection, but, well, there is that twisting thread of doubt that starting this same thing all over again can only be tempting fate.

And then there is the other problem: reading. Let’s put it this way, back in my late teens, in the two or three years before I went to university, I kept a list of the books I read. Those lists have long gone, but I know I was regularly getting through 200 books a year back then. How? Today I cannot begin to imagine how I ever found the time. I don’t think I ever came close to matching that score in all the decades since then. Though at the same time, up until lockdown I was consistently getting through 70+ books a year. Again, I now find it hard to imagine how I could do that. Lockdown knocked me back psychologically, and the number of books I was reading tumbled year on year. And then the horrors of last year completed the hatchet job on my psyche. In the last two years together I read fewer books than I would regularly manage in a single year before the world fell apart.

As I start to reinvent a way of living following Maureen’s death, I have begun to learn how to read for pleasure once more. But that doesn’t mean that reading is again quick and easy. Far from it. Reading a book, even when I am enjoying it, is still a painful and laborious process. As I write this, January is just over three weeks old. In that time I have been reading three books simultaneously, a fairly normal practice for me. One of those books, Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson, I finished Sunday, exactly three weeks after I first picked it up. I will be writing more fully about it below, but suffice it to say it is a book I enjoyed, a book that I found to be a real pleasure, where I seemed to be turning the pages eagerly to continue with the story. Another time, another me would have devoured that book in a matter of two or three days at the most; but no, 21 days! Why was it so hard? I don’t know, but the problem lies in me not the novel. A second book, which I began on the same day as the Atkinson, I will finish today (probably before I finish writing this post). That one is non-fiction, but not hard, not particularly demanding. Again, in more normal times another, earlier me would have taken a week at most to read it. But the third book, sitting downstairs on the coffee table in the lounge even as I write this, I began reading back in, I think, November. It is, in truth, a book I admire more than I like, but it is not a hard book, it is a book I want to read, yet in three months I have advance little more than 100 pages into the book.

Why do I find it so hard to read? It is not that I don’t enjoy reading; on the contrary it gives me immense pleasure. It is not that the books themselves are difficult to read; the Atkinson, as I say, is an unalloyed pleasure, she is easily one of my favourite writers and this is a superb example of her craft. It is not that I don’t have the time; quite the opposite, I often have more time than I know what to do with. But when I settle down with a nice cup of tea in one of the tub chairs in the bay window downstairs, I am strangely reluctant to pick up a book to read. Once I get over that initial obstacle I read with pleasure, though not so quickly as I used to. But that obstacle is real and persistent. I can sit for ages with the book within reach and not pick it up. It is something of a cliché that writers will find any excuse to avoid sitting down at an empty page or a blank screen, but these days I find it much much easier to start writing than to start reading. It shouldn’t be that way. I know it is wrong, but that is the way my mind is working, or perhaps more accurately, how my mind is not working. What do I fear in the books? What taboo do I break when I turn the page? It is, I know, somehow connected to the psychological damage of lockdown followed by Maureen’s illness, followed by her death. But I don’t know how it is connected, and I don’t know if there is a way through this tangled labyrinth. I don’t know if I can find the way out, or even if there is an out to be found.

But I persist with the labour of reading, because that is the nourishment my mind craves. And it is supposed to be fun. It is fun. Isn’t it?


Ma Meyrick. You can’t read much about those frenetic, jazz-filled days of the 1920s in London without coming across her. And she keeps cropping up. She has a supporting role in one episode in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, for instance. And now here she is again, at the tremulous heart of Kate Atkinson’s latest novel, Shrines of Gaiety. Those titular shrines are the nightclubs owned by Ma Meyrick, here renamed Nellie Coker.

Back in the 70s and 80s, when I was first getting into British fandom, any alcohol-fuelled get together, at a party, a bar, or a convention, would be greeted by cries of “fun, desperate fun!” It was a cry that always struck me as rather sad: any fun that is desperate isn’t likely to be fun. But desperate fun seems to epitomise those frantic years between the end of the First World War and Spanish Flu pandemic in 1919 and the Wall Street Crash in 1929. They were years in which the Bright Young Things felt as though they had been born again, having escaped the horrors of trench warfare while the effects of those horrors were all around them in the injured beggars they saw in the streets, in the way that women of a certain age vastly outnumbered men of that same age, in the memorials to the dead that were springing up in every town and village. They had a new lease of life, even though there was a widespread sense (that a number of the Bright Young Things probably believed as well) that they didn’t deserve it, that they had failed in life somehow by not being in the trenches.

They celebrated this ambivalent escape with bright clothes, short skirts, bobbed hair, loud music, sex, and alcohol. It was an age of excess for those rich enough to indulge and young enough to partake. You see it here in a chapter set in a wild party where everyone dresses up as infants and behaves like children, except for the vast quantities of alcohol consumed. It is a party that recalls similar scenes in Brideshead Revisited and some of the early Lord Peter Wimsey stories by Dorothy L. Sayers. [And as a totally irrelevant aside, writing that made me think that Agatha Christie, despite her youth when she began The Mysterious Affair at Styles, created old detectives, Poirot already retired, Marple already old; these were not people to participate in, or even fully understand, the excesses of the generation in which Poirot at least initially found himself.] The fun, the brightness, the freedom were desperate because there was still a sense of darkness from the past, and because, I think, they felt it was temporary, that they could not long escape those same shadows, those same trenches.

Ma Coker’s empire of nightclubs was the very locus of that desperate fun. Stumble down a staircase from the street, pay the entrance fee, sweep aside a curtain, and suddenly you were in a different world. It was a world of glitter and glamour, where dance bands played brightly even when a fight broke out, where pretty young women would dance with you for a small fee, where illicit alcohol and drugs were readily available, where you could mingle with the rich and famous, with royalty and with gangsters. After the too recent horrors this was all you wanted of the world, a place where the bright lights chased away the poverty, the industrial unrest, the grime and violence and dullness waiting just up those stairs, just outside in the narrow, ill-lit streets. That Ma Coker’s empire was itself sleazy and criminal and dangerous was irrelevant, it was the illusion that mattered.

Atkinson captures those contradictions beautifully, all through the differing characters of Ma Coker’s family, and those that circle around them. Like Kate Meyrick, Nellie Coker was the lone indomitable head of a large family whom she was grooming to inherit her empire. Or to be precise, it was the daughters who were going to inherit. Her eldest son, Niven, had been in the trenches, it had changed him, and though the family were still family, he stood apart from them and from the business empire. The younger son, Ramsey, had also been changed by time abroad, but in his case it was in a Swiss sanatorium, and now his engagement with the business is vague and ineffectual, and his real interest is in becoming a novelist, though he has no discernible literary ability.

The Coker family, the central importance of Nellie and her four daughters, epitomise something important about the novel: this is a world in which women dominate. All the strong central figures, even apart from the Cokers, are women. There is Freda, the waif-like young woman who comes to London seeking stardom on the stage but ends up dancing in one of Coker’s clubs. There is Florence, the clumsy, unimaginative friend who comes to London with Freda, then disappears into the mysteries of those dark streets. And above all there is Gwendolen. Liberated by an unexpected inheritance, she quits her job as a librarian in York and comes to London, supposedly to seek the daughter of a friend, Freda, but really in search of excitement, which she finds variously as a police spy and as the manager of one of Nellie’s clubs. Around these figures dance (and a maypole dance in which Freda once performed in a stage show in York is a repeated figure throughout the novel) a variety of other strong, independent women. There is Freda’s first landlady, a procuress and abortionist; there is the woman with whom Freda had once modelled knitwear and who is now a prostitute who gives Freda a home; there is Nellie’s cell mate at Holloway who has her own criminal network; and there are the “forty thieves”, a loose affiliation of pickpockets and bag snatchers who are not above a little violent mayhem when needed.

Against these women, the men tend to be villains (the corrupt policeman and the gang leader who both, separately, plot to oust Ma Coker and take over her business), victims (the society gossip columnist who meets a grisly and unexpected fate), or hapless onlookers (the unhappily married police inspector who is tasked with rooting out police corruption and who is working with Gwendolen in the hope of finding out why so many young girls are turning up dead in the Thames, but who proves to be ineffectual and unable to control events).

It is a large cast, and to accommodate them there is a large number of intersecting story lines than make for a very complex plot, made the more complex by Atkinson’s delight in shifting the viewpoint character from chapter to chapter (and sometimes within a chapter), plus her liberal use of cliffhangers. Because timelines and stories intermingle so intricately there are moments when, for instance, a minor character expresses sadness at what has happened to X, though it is another two chapters before the focus shifts back to X and we learn what prompted this sadness. The stories we are told are various. There’s a romance (though it would not be quite right to describe it as a love story), there’s mystery (as we try to sort out what has happened to the various missing girls), there’s intrigue (how will the different plots against Ma Coker play out, and how will she respond to them?), there’s coming-of-age (both Freda and Gwendolen grow into roles they could never have expected to play before coming to London), there’s even a ghost story (Nellie Coker is followed throughout by the ghost of a girl she had killed). But it would be wrong to describe the novel as any of these things. The many different stories, just like the many different characters, are just brush strokes delineating a rich, complex, and convincing portrait of one segment of London society at a key moment in the middle of the 1920s.

I find it hard to explain why I find Atkinson’s writing so compelling. The prose isn’t particularly lush, with grace notes that make you stop just to appreciate the beauty or the strangeness of a phrase, yet neither is it spare and precise and purposeful. It works, I think – and this feels like a rather graceless way to describe something that is full of grace – because it has a job to do, and it does that job well. It has a story to tell that is complex and yet never confusing. It has characters to introduce and manipulate yet it does so in a way that makes them feel drawn from life. It has a scene to set that is vivid, colourful, and feels as though you could step into it alongside the characters and witness it through the eyes of the time. It doesn’t race along, it takes its time, and yet it never relaxes its grip on you. It is prose you can relax into, confident in what it is doing, in the effect it is generating. It is simply a pleasure to let her tell you a story and know you believe her, know you trust her.

It helps, of course, that there is an air of tragedy about the book. A tragedy that seems inherent in the time and place: the darkness is too recent and it doesn’t feel like it can be truly over, there is another darkness waiting to return, to reclaim the world, hovering just beyond what we can sense. And for all the artificial gaiety, the desperate fun, there is still an underlying awareness that it cannot last forever. And so you keep reading, aware of the shadow, needing to know who will fall victim to it and who will not. The characters are too well drawn, you are invested in them, you know that doom awaits, but you need to know what doom and who will it claim, who will emerge into the light. With such a large cast you know that some endings will be tragic, some will be happy, but you also know how smoothly Atkinson can whip the rug from under your feet. And she does, of course, and there are tragedies, though not what you expected, and there is happiness but not necessarily what you anticipated. And in the end it just feels like the inevitable consequence of this particular time, this particular place.

And after all that it feels like I ripped through the book in no time, even though it took three weeks.

Lost? Girls?

14 Wednesday Oct 2020

Posted by Paul Kincaid in books

≈ Comments Off on Lost? Girls?

Tags

Anthony Powell, Barbara Skelton, Cyril Connolly, D.J. Taylor, Edmund Wilson, Evelyn Waugh, Feliks Topolski, George Orwell, George Weidenfeld, Ian Lubbock, Janetta Woolley, Joan Leigh Fermor, Lys Connolly, Michael Shelden, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Peter Quennell, Sonia Brownell, Stephen Spender

Back in the 1980s, Michael Shelden wrote Friends of Promise, an account of Cyril Connolly and the circle around him at Horizon, the literary magazine he edited throughout the 1940s. It remains the definitive work on this key aspect of literary London during wartime. That is the book, I think, that D.J. Taylor wanted to write. He had, after all, already written a biography of George Orwell, probably the most significant writer to have been published in Horizon (and, curiously, Shelden would follow up Friends of Promise with a biography of Orwell). Taylor had also written a book on the Bright Young Things of London society during the gilded age of the 1920s, and also The Prose Factory, a survey of literary life in England since 1918. Within such a spectrum of interest, Horizon and Connolly is not just a natural fit, it almost feels like the inevitable next step.

But Shelden had already taken that step, and despite the fact that letters and diaries and other resources have emerged since Shelden’s book was published, it is unlikely that Taylor would really have been in a position to write a startlingly new and different take on the same subject. So he let his gaze wander from the centre to the periphery, in particular to the young women who circled around Connolly, as lovers (or occasionally wives), secretaries, helpmeets, confidants. There were four of them in particular: Lys, Janetta, Sonia and Barbara. Collectively, Taylor calls them the “Lost Girls”, taking the term from Peter Quennell’s autobiography, The Wanton Chase. Taylor doesn’t wholly accept Quennell’s term, but he doesn’t exactly question it either. My own sense, on the other hand, is that they were neither lost nor girls. They were beautiful, ambitious, sexually active young women who found themselves in a particular wartime bohemia, and they took advantage of their circumstances that would have been unquestioned, even unremarked, if they had been men. The women who came before them in the 1920s were the same, as were the women who came after them in the 1960s, but because this was the 1940s they were somehow regarded as courtesans. Men who behaved the same would have been hailed as adventurers. Taylor doesn’t lay out the contrast so starkly, I’m not even sure he is fully aware of it, but it is there buried in the assumptions and subtexts of the book.

It is notable, for instance, that the first view of any of these women in Lost Girls: Love, War and Literature 1939-1951 comes from the male gaze. After Quennell’s description of the lost girls in general, there are four single-sentence quotations, one for each of the women: Edmund Wilson on Barbara, Stephen Spender on Sonia, Evelyn Waugh on Lys, and George Weidenfeld on Janetta. The women are perennial adjuncts to the men, to be seen from outside. The real interest is in the men who are doing things in Horizon, these women are just there to provide a different perspective on the main action.

Sonia Brownell on the left, Lys Connolly on the right

Lys, Janetta, Sonia and Barbara: the men in this book are Connolly, Quennell, Orwell, Waugh, Topolski, and so on, but the women are always addressed by their first names. In a long preamble, Taylor explains this as being because their surnames changed so often. Lys, for example, began life as Lys Dunlap; she married Ian Lubbock but soon thereafter left him to become Cyril Connolly’s mistress, changing her name to Connolly by deed poll when he wouldn’t marry her; after she left Connolly at the end of the decade she eventually married again and became Lys Koch. But she was Lys Lubbock or, by her own choice, Lys Connolly, for the entire period covered by this book. Sonia Brownell was known by that name throughout the 1940s until, right at the end of the decade, she became Sonia Orwell; similarly, Barbara Skelton had that name throughout the decade until, in the closing pages of the book as it were, Lys left Connolly and Barbara became, for a while, Barbara Connolly. Significantly, when she began publishing books in the 1950s she published under the name Barbara Skelton. There must, I think, have been more subtle, less sexually pointed ways, of identifying the various characters throughout the book.

Without exception, by the way, the men in this book are total shits, and the shittiest of them all is Cyril Connolly. At the end of the 1930s he was married to Jean but had left his wife to live with Diana, whom he then left to live with Lys. Lys remained his mistress, housekeeper, secretary, hostess of his innumerable parties, and general dogsbody for nearly ten years, but he would not marry her and spent an inordinate amount of time belittling her in conversation. Yet when she did leave him he spent years stalking her, bombarding her with letters, and insisting that they should get back together, all while having now married Barbara. This, by the way, was serial behaviour: when his marriage to Barbara ended, George Weidenfeld was cited in the divorce; when that marriage ended, Cyril Connolly was cited in the divorce. But it wasn’t just his treatment of women that was execrable. At the centre of this whole menage was the magazine, Horizon, which he had launched in December 1939. Part of the thinking behind this launch seems to have been that as editor he would be in a reserved occupation and thus not liable for any form of war work. The magazine was major literary and artistic centrepiece in mid-century Britain, but Connolly was a rather lazy editor who left much of the work to the women who worked there. Sonia Brownell in particular seems to have been the de facto if unacknowledged editor of the magazine throughout the last years of its life while Connolly used his expenses to fund foreign travel, a hectic social life, and fine food and wine, while occasionally remembering to write back to base and ask, casually, how the magazine was going.

The sex appeal of Cyril Connolly remains a mystery.

Actually, for a book ostensibly about literary London in wartime, we learn very little about Horizon itself. Only a bare handful of contributors are even mentioned, and there is no analysis of what it published or how it shaped the literary landscape for years to come. George Orwell appears because he went on to marry Sonia; Joan Rayner, whose photographs were published in Horizon, is mentioned because she was a sexually active member of that milieu who Connolly fancied before she went on to marry Patrick Leigh Fermor. Yet this neglect of Horizon as a literary artefact jars with the fact that Taylor is a good literary historian. One of the best things about this book, something that does make it well worth reading, is the adept way he uses novels and memoirs of the period to paint a vivid picture of how things were at the time. And there is a fine late section of the book in which Taylor traces the afterlife of the four girls in postwar novels by writers who knew them at the time. Barbara, for instance, is a recurring character in Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time sequence.

All told, therefore, it is an interesting and at times revealing book hampered by the way it approaches the four women who are supposedly its central subject matter.

Photographs

27 Sunday May 2018

Posted by Paul Kincaid in art, books

≈ Comments Off on Photographs

Tags

A.J. Ayer, Cyril Connolly, Evelyn Waugh, Frederick Ashton, Ian Collins, Joan Leigh Fermor, John Betjeman, John Craxton, John Rayner, Kenneth Clark, Lawrence Durrell, Lucien Freud, Margot Fonteyn, Niko Ghika, Olivia Stewart, Osbert Lancaster, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Xan Fielding

the photographs of joan leigh fermorThe Patrick Leigh Fermor industry has been busier since his death than he ever was in his lifetime. This year alone we have had a wonderful exhibition at the British Museum devoted to Leigh Fermor, Niko Ghika and John Craxton; which was in turn accompanied by an even more wonderful book, which to my mind is a model of what a book associated with an exhibition should be like. And now Ian Collins and Olivia Stewart have produced The Photographs of Joan Leigh Fermor: Artist and Lover. (Personally, I could have done without the somewhat saccharine quality of that subtitle; but then I could have done without much of the account of her life that occupies rather too much of this book, particularly since so much of it is devoted to telling us, repeatedly, how devoted she was to Paddy, and by extension how wonderful Paddy was.)

Joan Eyres Monsell, who became Joan Rayner before she became Joan Leigh Fermor, was almost a cliche. She came from the sort of family that makes Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited seem rather common and lower class. Her immediate ancestors include a member of Gladstone’s cabinet, a Chief Constable of the Metropolitan Police, a polar explorer, a First Lord of the Admiralty, a hymn writer, and, of course, a Baron. They were rich, influential, massive landowners, and residents of a stately home in the Cotswolds, Dumbleton Hall. She was the archetypal rebellious daughter of privilege, moving in artistic circles, friends with Cyril Connolly and John Betjeman and Lucien Freud and Freddy Ayer and Kenneth Clark and Osbert Lancaster and so on, and sleeping around with those of them who weren’t gay. When she married the journalist John Rayner in the late-1930s, he was monogamous, she wasn’t; the marriage did not last. And Joan helped to cement her position in this bohemian set by using her wealth, buying art from the artists, offering support for those who needed it.

Yet at this time she was also establishing a career for herself as a photographer. Her photographs appeared, often uncredited, in several of the Shell Guides that Betjeman was editing, also in the magazine Architectural Review, and in various other books and magazines. At the outbreak of the Second World War she was commissioned to photograph the heritage that was considered most at risk from German bombs, though with the onset of the Blitz this turned into a record of the damage done, her work appearing magazines like Horizon. As well as her photographic work, she served briefly as a nurse, and then trained to become a cipher clerk, being posted to Algiers, then paddyMadrid, and finally in 1944 to Cairo, where she met Paddy. (It somehow confirms things I’d begun to suspect from my other reading about Leigh Fermor to see him described here not just as charming, but as “indecisive, impractical and clumsy.”) They met again, after the war, in Greece, and began the romance that, in all I’ve read, seems to subsume everything else about her.

She continued to take photographs for various magazines for the next few years, but most of her work was to support Paddy’s journeys around Greece to research his books, Mani and Roumeli. Then, sometime around 1960, she simply stopped being a professional photographer. She had always been dismissive of her own talents, referring to her photographs simply as snaps, and from then on seemed to have largely reserved her photography for recording the house and Kardamyli that she and Paddy were building (mostly with her inheritance). Which is a pity, on the evidence here she was, at her best, quite a remarkable photographer.

greek villagersShe used, practically throughout her life, a Rolleiflex taking a square 6×6 negative. To show them at their best, the book is (almost) square, with the photographs placed in the middle of a grey page. It is a presentation that I find benefits the photographs while at the same time being frustrating to the viewer. I’ll come to the frustrations in a moment, but first let me just extol the pictures themselves. The early ones are haunting evocations of war-damaged London: an arched gateway set within fragments of wall at Haberdasher’s Hall, with nothing else standing, and in the foreground snow piling on the rubble before the gate; a barrage balloon floating almost directly above the tower of Hawksmoor’s St Anne’s seen from the grime of Limehouse Cut. There are too few of these, then suddenly we are in Greece and the character of the photographs has changed dramatically. Some are almost abstract: square blocks of an old village standing above a winding pattern of terraces like one of Ghika’s landscapes; a small family of goats plodding wearily up a zigzag stairway clinging precariously to a cliffside. Some are touristy: the Lion Gate at Mycenae, the ruins at Delphi, archetypal orthodox churches almost disappearing into rugged landscapes. Some really are family snaps: Paddy, of course, dancing among ruins or gazing moodily into the distance; and friends like Xan Fielding and Lawrence Durrell and John Craxton. There’s a wonderful series of margot fonteyn & Freddy Ashtonphotographs of Margot Fonteyn and Frederick Ashton performing dance exercises on the deck of a caique, using the ship’s rail as a bar; and there is a beautiful picture of Fonteyn sunbathing nude. But it is the photographs of rural life in Greece that are so wonderful: a muezzin calling out from a ramshackle wooden platform; craggy-faced shepherds in baggy pantaloons grasping crooks taller than they are; clusters of women in traditional costume; an old soldier with a long white beard and his rifle; young men clustered round a ricketty table in a crumbling kafeneion; the ribs of a boat that is being built but that looks like the skeleton of some long-dead sea monster. These are amazing glimpses of something alien and yet extraordinarily human.

I could, quite frankly, have done with less of the life of Joan Leigh Fermor that fills out the last 80-odd pages of this book, and more of the photographs of Joan Leigh Fermor. This is little more than a fragment of her output, after all. At one point there is one of her contact sheets, showing 12 pictures that are not otherwise included in the book. One of these shows a young woman in a floral print dress standing in a barren landscape, but with what looks like the skull of a horse over her head. That is a photograph I want to see full size, that is a photograph I want to examine more closely, that is a photograph I want to see explained.

But there is one of the problems I have with this book. The photographs are displayed, in the main, one to a page. There is nothing else on the page, nothing to distract from the picture, except a small white page number. There are no captions, no information about what we are seeing, until you turn right to the back of the book where you will find a list of photographs. Typically, what this tells you is as follows:

62  Margot Fonteyn
64  Corfu
65  PLF, Corfu
66  Phaestos
69  PLF, Kameiros, Rhodes

And that’s it, that’s all we get to know. This is not particularly fulsome information, there isn’t even a date. Admittedly, this seems to have been Joan Leigh Fermor’s fault, as a note at the head of this list says: “Unless Joan Leigh Fermor made a not of where a photograph was taken on the contact sheet, the location was not recorded.” As for dates, all we are told was that the London photographs date from 1940-41, and the rest between the 1940s and 1960s. It’s frustrating; many of the photographs are timeless, but those of rural Greek life are not, they are specific to a time and a place, and I suspect a lot of them are tied to particular local events and practices.

These are, for the most part, wonderful photographs and I could spend a lot of time looking at them. But they do leave me wanting to know more.

 

 

Recent Comments

Keith Knight on Love and Death
Paul Kincaid on Love and Death
Paul Kincaid on Love and Death
Chris Priest on Love and Death
Keith Knight on Love and Death

Archives

Blogroll

  • Big Other
  • Paper Knife
  • Ruthless Culture

Adam Roberts Arthur C. Clarke Award Arthur C Clarke books of the year Brian Aldiss Christopher Priest David Mitchell E.L. Doctorow Frederik Pohl Gene Wolfe George Orwell H.G. Wells Harlan Ellison Helen MacInnes Henry James Iain Banks Ian McEwan Ian Watson Isaac Asimov J.G. Ballard James Tiptree Jr John Banville John Clute John Crowley John W. Campbell Kate Atkinson Keith Roberts Kim Stanley Robinson Lucius Shepard Martin Amis Mary Shelley Maureen Kincaid Speller m john harrison nina allan Patrick Leigh Fermor Philip K. Dick Robert Heinlein Robert Holdstock Robert Silverberg Russell Hoban Samuel R. Delany Stephen Baxter Steve Erickson Thomas M. Disch Thomas More Ursula K. Le Guin William Boyd William Gibson William Shakespeare Winston Churchill

Blog at WordPress.com.

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
  • Follow Following
    • Through the dark labyrinth
    • Join 171 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Through the dark labyrinth
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...