Magazine Feature on Maclaren-Ross
In the latest issue of the excellent literary magazine, Verbal, edited by the bestselling novelist John King, there's a lengthy interview with Paul Willetts, who talks about how he came to write his biography of Maclaren-Ross. Click on this link to order a copy of Verbal.
New Edition of Memoirs of the Forties
Out of print for several years now, London Books (www.london-books.co.uk) will be releasing a new edition of this wonderful book in 2024. It will feature text deleted from the first posthumously published edition. What's more, there will be a comprehensive afterword detailing some of the Soho gems he planned to include in the book, which was unfinished at the time of his death.
Times Literary Supplement website reprints Maclaren-Ross's May 1953 appreciation of P.G. Wodehouse
Click here to re-read Maclaren-Ross's review. During the 1950s, he also wrote a fond parody of Wodehouse's writing, which appeared in Punch magazine and later in the Maclaren-Ross collection, The Funny Bone. Wodehouse sent Maclaren-Ross a letter telling him how brilliant and amusing the parody was.
Maclaren-Ross makes an appearance on the literary podcast, Backlisted
The latest edition (December 2018) of the literary podcast, Backlisted, focuses on Books Do Furnish A Room, the much-loved tenth volume in Anthony Powell's classic twelve-volume novel sequence, A Dance To The Music of Time. Central to the novel is Powell's barely fictionalised portrait of Julian Maclaren-Ross, whom he calls Francis Xavier Trapnel, author of such gems as Camel Ride To The Tomb.
BBC Radio 4 Extra repeat Mr X, of D.J. Taylor's radio documentary about Maclaren-Ross
On Friday 29 June 2018, BBC Radio 4 Extra repeated this excellent documentary, which features an interview with Julian's son, Alex. The programme will be available on the BBC radio iplayer until 29 July 2018. Just click here to listen to it.
The Salesman Only Rings Once: Julian Maclaren-Ross and the Vacuum-Cleaner in the 1930s
Thursday 14 June 2018, 5.30pm-7.30pm at the Curve Auditorium in the Forum, Bethel Street, Norwich. Free entry.
The University of East Anglia's Literature, Drama and Creative Writing Department will be presenting the inaugural Lorna Sage Memorial Lecture, to be delivered by Professor Maud Ellmann of the University of Chicago.
Of Love and Hunger appears in this beautiful new plumage
Penguin Modern Classics has at last seen sense by replacing the book's previous, unenticing dustjacket with this much more appropriate and attractive detail from a print by the great Edward Bawden.
Maclaren-Ross's skills as a short story-writer are acknowledged by the decision to feature him in the recently published Penguin Book of the British Short Story. Edited by the novelist and critic, Philip Hensher, the chosen story is the brief but tragic 'Death of a Comrade', originally published in The Stuff To Give The Troops. This same story, based on Maclaren-Ross's experiences of serving in a series of army depots during the Second World War, also features in his Selected Stories.
A London based bookdealer recently advertised a second edition of The Stuff To Give The Troops, featuring an unusual and touching inscription by Maclaren-Ross. 'My own copy,' it reads. 'Please do not steal, otherwise I shall have to pay full price for another. J. Maclaren-Ross, 21-1-43.'
Andrew Lownie, who runs the literary agency that represents the Maclaren-Ross Estate, has scored a critical and commercial hit with this comprehensive biography of the Soviet spy, Guy Burgess. It's hard to believe that Burgess and Maclaren-Ross didn't meet in Soho at some point, perhaps at the famous Gargoyle Club, which they both frequented.
Through interviews with more than a hundred people who knew Burgess personally, many of whom have never spoken about him before, and the discovery of hitherto secret files, Stalin's Englishman brilliantly unravels the many lives of Guy Burgess in all their intriguing, chilling, colourful, tragi-comic wonder.