Boyd Tonkin

Impish secrets

In a new memoir of the literary life, Edmund White describes returning yearly to Proust and Henry Green’s Nothing — though Lolita remains his favourite novel

issue 04 August 2018

  • The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading

    Edmund White

    Bloomsbury, pp. 240

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Kenton Allen

Long live the long lunch!

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I keep on my bedside table, where others might place religious texts, Keith Waterhouse’s seminal The Theory and Practice of Lunch. Waterhouse, that magnificent chronicler of Fleet Street’s liquid lunches and disappearing afternoons, understood what modern efficiency cultists cannot: that civilisation is measured not by what we produce but by how elegantly we pause. His

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