From Evelyn Waugh to Virginia Woolf and Sally Rooney, these novels offer masterclasses in dialogue-driven narrative
For better or worse, I am a literary Anglophile. My mother was too. As a child I remember peeking over her shoulder at the novels she read after dinner: PG Wodehouse, Ngaio Marsh, all 12 volumes of Anthony Powell. It was with my mother that I first watched Upstairs, Downstairs — I was 10 at the time – and, through it, got an early glimpse of the house party, a phenomenon the sheer Britishness of which enraptured me.
In the sunny and freewheeling Palo Alto of the 1970s and 80s, I read about cold manor houses in which each of the 18 bedrooms had a different hand-blocked wallpaper. I read about midnight assignations in garden pergolas. I read breakfast scenes, billiard-room scenes, scenes in which fraught hostesses laboured over the seating arrangements for formal dinners.
Continue reading…From Evelyn Waugh to Virginia Woolf and Sally Rooney, these novels offer masterclasses in dialogue-driven narrativeFor better or worse, I am a literary Anglophile. My mother was too. As a child I remember peeking over her shoulder at the novels she read after dinner: PG Wodehouse, Ngaio Marsh, all 12 volumes of Anthony Powell. It was with my mother that I first watched Upstairs, Downstairs — I was 10 at the time – and, through it, got an early glimpse of the house party, a phenomenon the sheer Britishness of which enraptured me.In the sunny and freewheeling Palo Alto of the 1970s and 80s, I read about cold manor houses in which each of the 18 bedrooms had a different hand-blocked wallpaper. I read about midnight assignations in garden pergolas. I read breakfast scenes, billiard-room scenes, scenes in which fraught hostesses laboured over the seating arrangements for formal dinners. Continue reading…