NOTES ON SOME
CONTRIBUTORS
HERMIONE LEE teaches English at the University ofYork and presents Channel 4's Book Fo ur programme. She is currently preparing a collection of essays, reviews and plays by Elizabeth Bowen, for publication by Virago.
SYBILLE BEDFORD is a novelist, travelwriter, winespecialist and VicePresident ofPEN. After many years abroad she has returned to London to write 'a kind of novel'. Virago recently re-issued her books A favo urite of tir e Gods and A Compass Error.
WILLIAM DEEDES is editor of the Daily Telegraph . In the '30s he was war correspondent for the Mo mi11g Post.ln between he was MP for Ashford and a member ofHarold Macmillan's Cabinet.
GERMAINE GREER is author of Sex aud Destiuy, a paperback edition of which will be published by Picador inJanuary . At present she is writing a book on Shakespeare for the OUP Past Master Series, and compiling an anthology of 17th century women's poetry for Virago .
POLLY DEVLIN was one of the judges on this year 's Booker panel. A student at the National Film School, she recently made a documentary about the morals of making documentaries. Her autobiography All Of Us There was published last April by Pan.
DAVID SEXTON is at Trinity College Cambridge, where he is writing a thesis on Nabokov . He has contributed to Tir e Speaa tor and the S u11day Times .
FAY WELDON's j a11e A us1e11 : Letters to A li ce was published last summer by MichaeiJoseph. She has just completed an adaptation of T ir e Life a11 d Loves ofa S/Je·DeJJil for BBC television. A paperback edition of the novel appears this month, published ,by Coronet.
NIGEL WEST has written several books about military intelligence, including histories of MI5 and MI6. He is currently writing a biography of the war-time double agent Garbo, which will be published next year by Weidenfeld.
PETERACKROYD on Lord Alfred Douglas ''Itwas not a happy family. Most of Lord Alfred Douglas's ancestors seem to have been either villainous or mad (one of them roasted a cook-boy on a spit), and when he declared that 'Icombine in my own veins the blood of the two greatest houses in Scotland and England'we see how much he resembles a poisonous flower that can be grown only in hothouse conditions.''
JEFFREY BERNARD on Low Life ''Thebusiness of corrupting and leading astray has always fascinated me because I so much enjoyed the diversion myself.''
GAVINSTAMP on the Church ' 'Bishopstalk of the necessity of compassion, of the cruel inadequacy ofapplying purely economic criteria to human problems, of the need to respectcommunities,yetthe Church ofEngland behaves with conspicuous ruthlessness when it comes to property and to money. Tradition, spiritual values and the importance of community life are seldom considered when the future of churches is discussed.''
THE
SPECfATOR
7SpWEEKLY AT YOUR NEWSAGENT
''Themost entertaining and best written weekly in the English language'' GRAHAMGREENE
)ECEMBER 1984
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