Jeremy Lewis
Grub Street Grouser
Julian Maclaren-Ross: Selected Letters
By Paul Willetts (ed)
Black Spring Press 351pp £9.95 order from our bookshop
Good writers aren’t necessarily good letter-writers. As a recent selection made clear, Graham Greene’s letters aren’t a patch on his memoirs or travel books, and those of his admirer and acquaintance Julian Maclaren-Ross are even more disappointing. Best remembered as a chronicler of the army and Fitzrovia in the 1940s, Maclaren-Ross is, with Patrick Hamilton and Denton Welch, one of the great writers of the period, remarkable for his wit, his masterly prose and his keen eye for oddities of dress and behaviour: but his letters are too concerned with the minutiae of Grub Street life to be of much interest to the world at large, and so marinated in anger, resentment and self-pity that even the most well-disposed of his admirers may find themselves longing for the end.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'To me, Elmore Leonard is as comforting in extremity as Pym, and as safe, in the last resort, as Wodehouse. The guys with the best lines are going to come out the other side; the dumb fucks are going to get it in the head or chest.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-spoonful-of-elmore
'As we read, we know that in a short time the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and colour television will sweep that age over the balustrade and into the sea, but for now everyone is happy.'
Simon Baker is charmed by Graham Swift's new novel, 'Here We Are'.
http://ow.ly/uDL050ylh80
'As science moves forward ... are we entering an era where sex is for leisure and IVF is for creating the perfect child?'
@MGilmore121 takes a look at the future of IVF in her review of @RobertKlitzman's 'Designing Babies'.
http://ow.ly/xuJY50ybNJa