David Lodge: Lives in Writing

West, Anthony 227, 231, 248, 253–4, 255

West, Rebecca 227, 230, 231, 232, 235–6

Weston, Jessie 67

Wharton, Edith 168

Whitehouse, Mary 176

Wilkomirski, Binjamin 236

Williams, Raymond 129, 162, 163

Wilson, Angus 181, 185

Wilson, Bryan 176

Wilson, Edmund 22

Wilson, Harold 178

Wimsatt, W.K. 135, 154

Wood, Charles 72

Woolf, Virginia 23, 50

Wordsworth, William 158

Yeats, W.B. 164

Yevtushenko, Yevgeny 40, 45

Yoder, Edwin 237

All but one of these essays have been published before, sometimes under a different title, but most of them have been substantially revised and extended for this book, and in some cases are conflations of pieces originally published separately. ‘The Late Graham Greene’, ‘The Rise and Fall and Rise and Fall of Kingsley Amis’, ‘A Tricky Undertaking: the Biography of Muriel Spark’, ‘Alan Bennett’s Serial Autobiography’, ‘The Greene Man Within’ and ‘Terry Eagleton’s Goodbye to All That’ were originally published in the New York Review of Books. The essay on Amis incorporates an introduction to his novel One Fat Englishman published by Penguin in 2011. ‘John Boorman’s Quest’ was originally published in the Times Literary Supplement. ‘Simon Gray’s Diaries’, an extended version of an article which appeared first in the Guardian Review, was published in the Critical Quarterly. ‘Frank Remembered — by a Kermodian’ combines a contribution to There Are Kermodians, edited by Anthony Holden and Ursula Owen, presented to Frank Kermode in 1999 on his 80th birthday, with a review previously published in the New York Review of Books, and was first published in this form in the Critical Quarterly. ‘Malcolm Bradbury: Writer and Friend’ is a new essay which incorporates parts of several occasional pieces I have written about him since his death. The publication history of ‘The Death of Diana’ is explained in the prefatory note. ‘Trollope’s Fixed Period’ and ‘Writing H.G. Wells’ are extended versions of articles that first appeared in the Guardian Review. I am grateful to the editors of these publications who commissioned the essays in their original form, or were receptive to my proposals to write them.

I am grateful to my agent Jonny Geller for his encouragement of the project; to my editor, Geoff Mulligan, for numerous suggested improvements of the text; to Jane Smiley for first drawing my attention to Trollope’s The Fixed Period ; to ‘AggieH’ for permission to include her contribution to the Guardian website about the theme of Trollope’s novel; and as always to my wife Mary, for her comments on various drafts of these essays.