Harry Mount
Kindled Spirits
‘It’s a safe place for widows,’ said a helper at the last Dartington Literary Festival, when I asked her why book festivals were doing so well these days.
Now that’s not much of a slogan. ‘Safe for Widows’ carries all the dank, characteristically British, low expectations of a sign I saw this week outside a lock-keeper’s cottage outside Hertford – ‘Don’t pet the dog; it may bite’.
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'Unlike much that was extracted from India, these paintings were not plunder, and those who created them were properly remunerated and often received due credit.'
@PParkerWriting on 'Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/artists-for-hire
‘"I feel", Lowell told Hardwick ... "as if I were pulled apart and thinning into mist, or rather being torn apart and still preferring that state to making a decision."'
Richard Davenport-Hines on the letters of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/yours-unfaithfully-2
'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