Bargains! PROMOTIONS
Pamela Hansford Johnson shocked the public at age twenty-three when she published This Bed Thy Centre (1935), a sexually frank novel inspired by her romance with Dylan Thomas. Its success allowed Johnson to quit secretarial work and launch a full-time literary career. She would publish twenty-six more novels, and though Johnson's career was overshadowed in her lifetime by that of her second husband, the novelist C. P. Snow, The Unspeakable Skipton (1959) retains a more passionate following than any of her other books, or his. Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and longtime book columnist for The Washington Post. He is also the author of the memoir, An Open Book, the Edgar Award-winning On Conan Doyle, and five collections of essays and literary entertainments.
""If this is not a great book, then I don't know what greatness is."" --Edith Sitwell ""Witty, satirical, and deftly malicious."" --Anthony Burgess ""Her best work . . . Hansford Johnson at her wittiest is Waugh mingled with Malcolm Bradbury. She deserves a revival."" --Ruth Rendell, The Sunday Telegraph ""A brilliant and terrifying portrait of an artist whose obsession with his own work has driven him beyond the bounds of reason and sanity."" --Venetia Murray, Books and Bookmen ""A maliciously witty account of literary skulduggery and lofty pretensions, set in Johnson's beloved Bruges."" --Miranda Seymour, Times Literary Supplement
