Patrick Skene Catling
Closing Time at the Bar
As the 84-year-old widow of a QC, and with an OBE for services to literature, Jane Gardam is an expert on achievement, old age, bereavement, and rivalry in the legal profession, and she empathises vividly with her fictional characters in comparable circumstances. A consummate storyteller, she writes of life with wonderful gusto and wry humour, and of death with a poignance entirely uncloyed by mawkishness.
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'The Bible is all but silent on yellow, as it is on most colours.'
http://ow.ly/TEWD50xV2cs
'Houses always reveal something of their occupants, but none so much as writers’ houses.'
Frances Wilson goes from Keats House to Dove Cottage and beyond.
http://ow.ly/Efja50xrrbM
'I miss, in this free society ... the kind of solidarity, the shared accountability, the willingness to risk one’s skin for others, that came with the unremitting threat levelled against dissident society.'
Roger Scruton interviews Vaclev Havel (2003).
http://ow.ly/z7kX50xTGmR