As a child, I looked forward to the glossy, hardback Beano Annual I would receive each Christmas and relished the smell of the newly minted pages when it was unwrapped. It was my first taste of the Christmas book. Today, this seasonal beast is big business; booksellers expect to shift around half of the year’s [...]

The Observer, 6 November 2005
VS Pritchett: A Working Life
by Jeremy Treglown
Pimlico £12.99, pp 308
VS Pritchett (or VSP) was his generation’s leading man of letters, a critic as adept and humorous as Virginia Woolf. His output was prodigious: reviews, essays, novels, biographies and, most importantly, short stories. The man was a writing machine and Jeremy Treglown’s [...]