Sunday, August 17, 2025

The Towers of Trebizond was partly written at Butlin’s in Skegness

I'm an admirer of Rose Macaulay's writing, and wouldn't share the critical judgement in this old London Review of Books article by Claire Harman. Still it does contain an irresistible trivial fact and a good joke at her expense:

Perhaps The Towers of Trebizond is the only one of Macaulay’s 23 novels in which a satisfactory balance between style and content is achieved. A charming detail is that this cosmopolitan story was partly written at Butlin’s in Skegness, where she had taken Gerald O’Donovan’s granddaughters for a holiday. 

Macaulay was not a snob, though she was taken up by snobs all her life, and relished a very active social life. Macaulay’s greatest claim to fame was the most perishable: she was a ‘golden talker’, valued by literary hostesses from her first appearance in print onward, and described by Naomi Royde-Smith in terms equally applicable to a patent corkscrew, ‘welcome at any dinner table, invaluable at weekends’.

So irresistible that it's our Trivial Fact of the Day.

1 comment:

  1. A book also famous for one of the best opening lines in English Literature: “Take my camel, dear,” said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass."

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