Photo: Paul McNicholls / Camera Press / TT (1979)
Sample of authors
Household, Geoffrey
Geoffrey Edward West Household grew up in Bristol where he attended Clifton College in 1914–19. He went on to study English at Magdalen College, Oxford, graduating in 1922. Immediately afterwards, he worked for a bank in Bucharest, Romania. In 1926, he moved to Spain where he sold bananas for a fruit company. In 1929, he went to the United States where he became a travelling salesman in printing i...
Literary figures
Boysie (Brian) Oakes
Gender: Male
He is recruited as a spy by mistake, and is regarded as tough, ruthless and bloodthirsty. In actual fact, he is an easy-going, forgetful and cowardly mummy’s boy, who hires gangsters to carry out the acts of violence he is ordered to do. This doesn’t prevent Brian ‘Boysie’ Oakes from making a career. It is simplest to describe him as a parody of James Bond, and John Gardner has written a suite of...