Who would have thought it? Dumbed-down British television, now infamous throughout the world for its infantilism, has actually given us some documentaries and docu-dramas on the neglected genus of author recently: George Eliot, Jane Austen, Philip Pullman, Philip Larkin, the Brontës, George Orwell and Shakespeare have all featured, and the BBC's Big Read campaign, though a little patronizing, has proved popular. All the above are famous names, of course, but in the centenary of his death, even George Gissing and New Grub Street received a few minutes' attention in Channel Four's The Story of the Novel. George Gissing on TV! The age of miracles is not yet dead . . .
The long-awaited biography Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia: The Bizarre Life of Julian Maclaren-Ross, by Paul Willetts, was issued in March 2003 by Dewi Lewis Publishers, and it's an admirable achievement. Maclaren-Ross's fine wartime novel Of Love and Hunger is now in print from Penguin . . .
Welcome news for Dowsonians: the first edition for more than fifty years of his short stories is now in print from the University of Birmingham Press. Ernest Dowson: Collected Shorter Fiction (2003) includes the five tales from Dilemmas (1895) -- dedicated to Dowson's beloved 'Missie' (Ellen Adelaide Mary Foltinowicz) --plus four other stories from The Yellow Book and The Savoy, including his moving study 'The Dying of Francis Donne' (1896), one of the great short gems of the period. Dowson's complete poems, edited by R. K. R. Thornton and Caroline Dowson, has recently been published by Birmingham . . .
To mark the seventieth anniversary of Lost Horizon Summersdale Publishers brought out James Hilton's classic in March 2003. Dr J. R. Hammond of the Hilton Society tells us there are hopes for a plaque at the author's birthplace at Leigh in Lancashire. We hope to commemorate the fifty years since Hilton's death in an unusual way later in 2004 . . .
Nicolas Granger-Taylor, one of our stalwarts, launched The London Adventure in 2003, a kind of practical, active arm of the Lost Club, exploring our types of author by visiting the locations associated with their lives and works. Enjoyable perambulations celebrating Machen, Bram Stoker and Dracula, Aubrey Beardsley, Dowson, Shiel and Crowley have so far been held, and a search party has even gone in quest of Machen's chimerical Lost Club. Further details are available from ngrangertaylor@aol.com or write to him at Flat 2, 35 Grafton Way, London W1T 5DB . . .
The horror! The horror! One of your editors -- we won't embarrass him by naming the fellow -- recently purchased a book by that personage Ernest Hemingway. It does have an appearance by Crowley, and Arlen's work is complimented, but what is the Lost Club coming to? We'll be reading Gertrude Stein next. Jeff Dempsey, writing in Colin Langeveld's Doppelgänger Broadsheet some time ago, wondered if his chums feared for his sanity: he confessed to reading stories by authors who are still alive! The shame of it . . .