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The end of a sentence is a weighty occasion. The end of a paragraph is even weightier (as a general guide, aim to put its best sentence last). The end of a chapter is seismic but also more pliant (either put its best paragraph last, or follow your inclination to adjourn with a light touch of the ga…

Bellow Sr, Abraham Bellow, who died in 1955, always described Saul as a desperate sluggard, the only son ‘not working only writing’. Not working? From Augie March:

All the while you thought you were going around idle terribly hard work was taking place. Hard, hard work, excavation and digging,…

To repeat: as a young man Larkin was intrigued, or better say fatally mesmerised, by the Yeatsian line about choosing between ‘perfection of the life’ and perfection ‘of the work’. But that was a line in a poem (‘The Choice’), not in a manifesto; no one was supposed to act on it (and Yeats certainl…

In general, Christopher chose not to avail himself of the new carnal freedoms of his era. The promiscuity that most of us were going in for he found…somehow not serious enough. There was I think a further scruple, less paradoxical than it at first seems, because he was someone in whom many cultural…

Norman’s answer was that his heterosexuality was so intense and impregnable that he was ideally placed to interpret its obverse. The story doesn’t end there, of course, and Norman would strike back, saying in an interview that literary England was controlled by a gay cabal headed by Christopher Hit…