Guy Rundle

Booth’s point is simple enough: Larkin projected multiple personas in his life, many of which summoned up images of old Englishness, while at the same time getting on with being a modern person and an important poet. Some of this has been obvious for some time. Though he projected the approved Movement-style philistinism and Little-Englandism, the poems of The Less Deceived are the obvious product of someone steeped in French symbolism, pre-war surrealism, and the explosive effects of apocalyptics such as George Barker.

It cannot escape notice that, by King’s telling, things really start to go screwy when a much wider range of people get access not merely to politics, but to the political self-expression that was hitherto the preserve of the author… his sometimes acute analysis of particular deployments of notions of offence treats them as akin to an act of state censorship, a charge the Right relies on almost obsessively.

Feigel has gathered together a half-dozen writers – Graham Greene, Henry Green (the pen-name of Henry Yorke), Elizabeth Bowen, Rose Macaulay, Rosamond Lehmann, and the little-known Hilde Spiel – and traced their lives, loves and works through the first shattering attacks in 1940-41 to the lull, and then the resumption in 1944, as the pilotless V-1 and V-2 attacks began.

If Australia were invaded, should it be defended? This is the question at the heart of a short essay by Guy Rundle published…