I have started reading Ma'am Darling, Craig Brown's book about Princess Margaret, and it is every bit as good as the reviews said it was.
The book's genesis, Brown says, lay in the way Margaret cropped up in the index of every biography from her period that he opened.
Here is a little run he gives from Margaret Drabble's biography of Angus Wilson:
Margaret, Princess
Marie Antoinette
Market Harborough
Given my love of a good index, I found this immediately appealing, and here I am left wondering what Angus Wilson's connection with Market Harborough was.
And it has led me to think about Angus Wilson too. He was a novelist and writer of short stories whose work was held in high regard when I read it avidly back in the Seventies, along with his critical studies of Charles Dickens and Rudyard Kipling. Yet he has since fallen out of print.
This 1991 BBC film as broadcast in 1991, the year he died, tells the story of his success and eclipse late in life.
"An excursion to Leicester University to speak in a seminar in early March [1970] proved disastrous: they were stuck in a snowstorm overnight at the Wellingborough Hotel in Market Harborough, where Angus tried to sleep on a sofa amidst the noisy shouting and singing of stranded travellers."
ReplyDeleteThere's another brief mention in connexion with a Moroccan friend called Mohamed 'Mohamed to Angus May 1970: "I love her and she love me but! ... I am sorry about what happened to you since you lift me at Market Harborough."'
Thanks so much, but I know of no Wellingborough Hotel in Market Harborough.
ReplyDeleteBut a search of the British Newspaper Archive confirms there was a serious blizzard here on 4 March 1970, with serious disruption to road traffic.
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