Books & Boots

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote 5 novels and some 150 short stories, as well as numerous articles for magazines. In the 1960s Penguin Books published all the novels, four collections of short stories and this volume, which combines five key autobiographical pieces and five short stories. This blog post summarises the five autobiographical pieces, numbers 1 to 5 in the list below. I...

‘This is our way of doing things,’ he thought. ‘Generous and fresh and free; a sort of Virginia-plantation hospitality, but at a different pace now, nervous as a ticker tape.’
(Michael Curly watching the extravagant wedding in ‘The Bridal Party’, page 93)

A Penguin selection of seven of the 150 or so short stories which F. Scott Fitzgera...

Each year the Royal Academy holds its well-known Summer Exhibition, which is always packed to the rafters. Alongside this, they hold a parallel exhibition of young artists, for students aged 4 to 18. It’s a free, open-submission competition which means tens of thousands of schoolchildren send in their artworks – over 25,000 this year – and the judges – this year Jane...

Richard Dadd (1 August 1817 to 7 January 1886) is known as the promising Victorian artist who was just gaining a reputation for his colourful fairy paintings when, at the age of 26, he suffered a catastrophic mental breakdown, murdered his father (August 1843) and was confined for the rest of his life (43 years) to Bethlem Hospital for the Insane.

Here he was allowed t...

‘What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon?’ cried Daisy, ‘and the day after that, and the next thirty years?’
(The ennui of the very rich, one of the themes of The Great Gatsby, page 124)

‘The Great Gatsby’ is an amazingly, spectacularly brilliant novel, surely one of the greatest short novels ever written. Obviously it’s F. Scott Fit...