I guess the Ravenscrofts will soldier on

[Tom & Cheryl Roche]

>From The Gruinard's "The Week In Books" column (note last paragraph.)

tom in atlanta



* The supplement of the Dictionary of National 
Biography for those who died between 2001 and 
2004, published this month, is remarkably rich in 
writers. The post-millennial mortality rate among 
poets - Charles Causley, DJ Enright, David 
Gascoyne, Thom Gunn, Ian Hamilton, Elizabeth 
Jennings, Kathleen Raine, Peter Redgrove and CH 
Sisson all appear - is especially striking, but 
there are also novelists as diverse as Simon 
Raven and WG Sebald, the travel writers Norman 
Lewis and Wilfred Thesiger, and scholars and 
biographers including Elizabeth Anscombe, Ernst 
Gombrich, Christopher Hill, Roy Jenkins, 
Elizabeth Longford, Ben Pimlott, JH Plumb, Roy 
Porter, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Bernard Williams and 
Richard Wollheim.

In a volume including Raine, there can be little 
doubt which entry contains the most colourful 
anecdotes (her otter-slaying curse on her 
ex-inamorato Gavin Maxwell and high estimation of 
"the quality of my sexual love" are duly 
mentioned). But it's agreeable to learn that Mary 
Wesley carried a card reading "Under no 
circumstances do I wish to be visited in hospital 
by Margaret Thatcher"; that the atheist William 
Cooper had to be restrained from "heckling the 
bride's clerical uncle" at a wedding; that Peter 
Barnes always wrote "in a hamburger bar in 
central London, from nine until one with the 
hamburger cooling in front of him"; and that 
Arthur Hailey's wife described him fondly as 
"temperamental, ruthless, sensitive, impatient, 
emotional, unreasonable, demanding, self-centred 
..."

Many entries provide information on "wealth at 
death", an arguably vulgar but fascinating 
service. Who would have guessed, for example, 
that Barnes (£2,366,142), Plumb (£1,374,755), 
Sebald (£823,124), John Peel (£1,752,633) and 
Auberon Waugh (£2,029,132) would all end up worth 
more than Douglas Adams (£431,348)?


http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/mar/28/week-in-books