Archives for February 25, 2020

From 2004:

I love parody and caricature, and it’s one of my medium-sized regrets that I have no gift for either (though I can do adequate impersonations of a few of my friends). Alas, I find it impossible to get inside another person’s prose style. I once tried to write a parody of a Jeeves novel in the style of Bright Lights, Big City. That was actually a pretty good idea, conceptually speaking, but I stalled out halfway through the fourth sentence, so it went unwritten, and the only thing I can remember about it now is that the very first word was, of course, “you.”…

Read the whole thing here.

“Only when one’s friends die and one accompanies them to the grave’s edge does one realise precisely what they have meant to one.”

James Lees-Milne, diary, March 25, 1977