‘ISN’T ROBERT SIMPLY killing?’ gushed Nancy Mitford to her brother Tom. ‘I love it when he talks about poetry & books, he seems to hate everything which ordinary people like! Somebody mentioned Keats & he gave an awful look & said “That man”.’ So taken was Mitford by the precocious Robert Byron – he had written his first book, Europe in the Looking-Glass, at the age of twenty – that she would happily have married him, had it not been for his penchant for ‘this wretched pederasty’; after his death in 1941 she declared that she had ‘never known anyone so complex’, and that, more than anything else, she missed his jokes.

Literary Review

Nov 2003

Categories

Jeremy Lewis

Saint Victor

Case History of a Literary Groupie

Those Inky Scoundrels

A Worthy Enthusiasm

The Emigrés

A-Changin’ Times

Judging by the Cover

Hiding in Plain Sight

Gubbins’s Guerillas

England, My England

Plumped Pages

Homeland Insecurity

Glittering Entries

An Affair to Misremember

Press Gangs and Pensioners

Well Met By Moonlight

Queen of the Slush Pile

The Clownish Poet

The Invisible Man

Any Advance?

Hats off to Harold

The Hills Are Alive

‘A Huge Hungry Dog’

‘The Uncelebrated Hardware of Our Language’