Daddy Dearest

Cressida Connolly was the natural choice to review a new edition of Stephen Spender’s journals. From the Spectator:

In these pages we encounter Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire, Igor Stravinsky, Alfred Brendel, Iris Murdoch, Edith Sitwell, Harold Pinter, Henry Moore, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and countless others … Of course I am biased, but it seems to me that my father Cyril Connolly is the most brilliant and touching and flawed and funny — the most human — of Spender’s friends. He animates the pages on which he appears, a sort of Falstaff to Spender’s John of Gaunt.

You can find all reviews for New Selected Journals here … although you’re better off with John Crace’s Digested Read.

____________________________________________________________________