The Diaries of a. L. Rowse - Hardcover

Ollard, Richard

4.29

7 ratings by Goodreads

9780713995725: The Diaries of a. L. Rowse

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0713995726 ISBN 13: 9780713995725

Publisher: Allen Lane, 2003

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Rowse's journals extend over the greater part of the 20th century. He was born in 1903 and died in 1997. The son of a poor, virtually illiterate Cornish china-clay worker he became one of the most prolific authors of his time and one of the most-read. For fifty years a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford (its first working-class entrant) he seized the opportunities offered in scholarship, in literature, in politics and above all in public controversy.

Rowse also has a gift of describing country houses and their often eccentric inmates just when the old system was crumbling into dissolution. And yet he is equally alive to New York, to California, to the opulence of great American mansions and to the openness of American universities.

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Review:

"Egoists make the best diarists, provided they write honestly and vividly...these memoirs are wonderfully alive and bleakly moving." -- Daily Mail, March 28, 2003 (by John Casey)

"Monsters are huge fun to read about and this is an extraordinary and rancorous book, sulphuric in its rage." -- Express, April 19, 2003 (by Roger Lewis)

"This is a marvellously revealing portrait of one of the 20th-century most scholarly writers..." -- Good Book Guide, May 1, 2003

"...it is Rowse’s shrill misanthropy that gives these pages much of their energy and makes them so entertaining." -- Evening Standard, April 22, 2003 (by Peter Parker)

Synopsis:

A.L. Rowse's journals extend over the greater part of the 20th century. Born in 1903, the son of a poor, virtually illiterate Cornish china-clay worker, he became one of the most prolific authors of his time and one of the most read. For 50 years a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford (its first working-class entrant) he seized the opportunities offered in scholarship, in literature, in politics and above all in public controversy.

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