Oh, England. What do you do to those who love you? ibid. Muggeridge
The Cussen report was never made public in Wodehouse’s lifetime. He was never officially exonerated from blame and continued to be plagued by questions about the broadcasts. Wodehouse was knighted in 1975 and died a month later. He never returned to England. ibid. caption
His masterwork The Great Gatsby has already been filmed four times. Sincerely, F Scott Fitzgerald: A Culture Show Special, BBC 2013
This Side of Paradise: a novel about flappers written for philosophers. ibid.
Gatsby himself remains largely a reported figure. ibid.
As a young boy St Aubyn was repeatedly raped by his father ... A series of books ... The grim material of his life ... Wickedly funny. The Culture Show: Edward St Aubyn – At Last, BBC 2014
In the early 1950s the nation recognised in its midst a social movement called Beat Generation, and a novel titled On the Road became a best-seller. Jack Kerouac: King of the Beats, geezer, Sky Arts 2013
Geezer at piano: How would you define the word beat ...?
Kerouac: Well, sympathetic. ibid.
Jack Kerouac lived his life in constant restless activity. He observed and then reported in lucid poetic stream of consciousness detail. ibid.
Rejection haunted Jack wherever he went. ibid.
D H Lawrence is one of the outstanding and most prolific writers of the twentieth century ... But Lawrence is a writer with a bad reputation. First and foremost because he dared to write about sex. D H Lawrence: A Journey Without Shame, BBC 2013
‘Why why why was I born an Englishman!’ ibid. Lawrence
His first great novel – Sons and Lovers. It’s a hundred years since Lawrence’s working-class coming-of-age novel was published. ibid.
Sons and Lovers still feels surprisingly modern. ibid.
That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong. F Scott Fitzgerald
Literature is a textually transmitted disease, normally contracted in childhood. Jane Yolen, Touch Magic: Fantasy, Faerie & Folklore in the Literature of Childhood
Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary. Boris Pasternak
It is literature which for me opened the mysterious and decisive doors of imagination and understanding. To see the way others see. To think the way others think. And above all, to feel. Salman Rushdie
Literature is one of the most interesting and significant expressions of humanity. P T Barnum
Literature is the thought of thinking Souls. Thomas Carlyle, Essays, Memoirs of the Life of Scott
Kierkegaard is dripping with ejaculate. The Casual Vacancy II, Colin, BBC 2015
Literature is the orchestration of platitudes. Thornton Wilder, Time 12th January 1953
Sometimes there’s a snobbery among literary types that these people don’t really get it, but in a lot of ways they get it more than the literati. There’s a culture in the background that they understand and know. They get that deeper level. Irvine Welsh
The romantic novel – this is literature that was as revolutionary as a political manifesto. Lucy Worsley, A Very British Romance, BBC 2015
Samuel Richardson was the fairy godfather of British romance. ibid.
The cult of sensibility ... They do buy love only when it’s balanced with economic sense. ibid.
Jane Austen created the imaginary world in which she had all the choice and control that she lacked in the real world. ibid.
For the judging of contemporary literature the only test is one’s personal taste. If you much like a new book, you must call it literature even though you find no other soul to agree with you, and if you dislike a book you must declare that it is not literature though a million voices should shout you that you are wrong. The ultimate decision will be made by Time. Ford Madox Ford
This is Dickens’ World in Kent – a vast tourist attraction built to take visitors inside the novels of Charles Dickens. Armando’s Tale of Charles Dickens, BBC 2016
The work of Charles Dickens isn’t just quality entertainment for a long-dead audience, Dickens’s world of the imagination is as complex and as dark and as sophisticated as any modern city. ibid.
David Copperfield: the book he described as his favourite child ... ‘I like this the best.’ ibid.
Dickens’ life-long sympathy with the way children think actually affected everything he wrote. Dickens wrote children’s stories for adults ... they read like fairytales. ibid.
Of his fourteen major novels almost all are among literature’s greatest titles. Great Britons s1e1: Charles Dickens, H2 2018
John Dickens’ carelessness with money began to threaten the family’s security. ibid.
The 16-year-old boy began his first career as a clerk in a lawyer’s office. ibid.
Dickens became tremendously famous. Dickens became a hot property. ibid.
‘The news spread rapidly that Dickens had come, and at once the throng of visitors poured in’. ibid. Atlantic Monthly US report
‘His fiction which had begun to reflect a darker view of life.’ ibid. commentator
For the poet Sylvia Plath the post-war American dream was a prison, not a paradise. She grew up in the age of Cold War witchhunts and conservative values. For clever ambitious girls, 1950s America was suffocating. Sylvia Plath: Inside the Bell Jar, BBC 2018
Embraced by the literary world for her astonishing poetry she spent her life besieged by inner demons. In her only novel The Bell Jar she told her own story: it was life as a woman in 1950s America laid bare. ibid.
Four weeks after The Bell Jar was published in 1963 Sylvia Plath committed suicide. ibid.
‘I just bumped from my hotel to work and to parties, and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolleybus. I guess I should have been excited the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn’t get myself to react.’ ibid.
The Mann-Booker Prize is one of the most coveted literary awards in the world. Prize night is the most hotly anticipated event in the literary calendar. Winning is life-changing. Barneys, Books & Bust-Ups, BBC 2018
The Booker has always been a magnet for scandal. ibid.
From humble beginnings in the late 1960s this prize revolutionised the sleepy world of literary fiction. This is a tale of fierce rivalries, bruised egos and most importantly of all countless brilliant books. ibid.
‘Posh bingo is what Julian Barnes called it.’ ibid. Peter Staus, literary agent
What a real playwright has to do is to say to the audience in effect – this is what you think, you are seeing in life every day, and turn it around and say – This is what it really is. Arthur Miller: Writer, Sky Atlantic 2018
My father had become a national icon of the theatre decades before I was born. ibid. daughter
We didn’t have a freezer. And we didn’t have a cake. ibid. Miller
I finished the play in about five days. ibid.
From the beginning writing meant freedom. ibid.
I felt that I was out of place more than anything else. ibid.