Please activate cookies in order to turn autoplay off Elizabeth Day is underwhelmed by Penelope Fitzgerald's sketchy tale of 60s bohemians Penelope Fitzgerald has been compared variously to DH Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh and Martin Amis. Full Article at Guardian Unlimited

True to Strachey's recommendation, the word "secret" seemed to be almost obligatory in the title itself for Selina Hastings' The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham (John Murray, £25) and Paula Byrne's Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of... Full Article at The Scotsman

• The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879-1921, by Isaac Deutscher {Magnificient biography finally back in print, along with Volumes II and III. Full Article at Snarksmith

Fantastic! Every word of every book, letter, note and diary entry that Evelyn Waugh wrote is to be reprinted by the Oxford University Press, the Londoner’s Diary reports. This news should not be exciting. Full Article at Spectator Magazine

Idle and ailing, James Whale drowned himself in his swimming pool in 1957—shades of the obsolete Englishman-in-Hollywood from Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One. Whale's filmmaking career had come and gone with the 1930s, and was almost forgotten. Full Article at Village Voice

• The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879-1921, by Isaac Deutscher {Magnificient biography finally back in print, along with Volumes II and III. Full Article at Snarksmith

SPIN recently visited the Brooklyn apartment of Vampire Weekend frontman Ezra Koenig for the magazine's "In My Room" section, where we show off the decor and beloved possessions of your favorite rock'n'rollers. Full Article at Spin

Read more of the interview with Baylor University theology and literature professor Ralph C. Wood, author of FLANNERY O’CONNOR AND THE CHRIST-HAUNTED SOUTH (Eerdmans, 2004): I had the great good fortune of going to a small Texas university called East... Full Article at Thirteen NY Public Television

Isabella Blow was a genius, and she got screwed. Full Article at Glam.com

What, apart from being dead and, in their different ways, remarkable, do the following authors have in common: Kingsley Amis, Saul Bellow, Roberto Bolaño, Jorge Luis Borges, William Burroughs, Italo Calvino, John Cheever, Ralph Ellison, Janet Frame,... Full Article at The Independent

• The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879-1921, by Isaac Deutscher {Magnificient biography finally back in print, along with Volumes II and III. Full Article at Snarksmith

Writer in residence ... Jan Morris at home in Wales. Photograph: Colin McPherson 'And what is your favourite of them all?", people often ask me, when they learn I have spent most of my 83 years looking at cities around the world. Full Article at Guardian Unlimited

• The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879-1921, by Isaac Deutscher {Magnificient biography finally back in print, along with Volumes II and III. Full Article at Snarksmith

When I first set foot in Fleet Street forty years ago, it still wore an air of romance, and it still existed as more than a street sign. Full Article at Powell's Books

Our offshore newspaper proprietors have won. Parliament will now be of the rich, by the rich, for the rich. For the millionaires in David Cameron's Shadow Cabinet there is nothing to fear from the Kelly proposals. Full Article at The Independent

Only a bad attack of nostalgia could have prompted Sarah Waters to write The Little Stranger. The novel is set in Warwickshire in the late Forties, when England is still trying to come to terms with the aftermath of the war. The old order is changing. Full Article at Calcutta Telegraph

Black comedy — I should make explicit here that I refer to comedy that violates social taboos, not comedy by African Americans — throve in the 1960s, with such luminaries as Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce mocking some of our national foibles. Full Article at The Corner

Stephen Poliakoff's Glorious 39 (a British premiere at the London Film Festival) is a far more subversive film than its Brideshead Revisited-style patina of nostalgia first suggests. Full Article at The Independent

The problem with the Conservative Party, Evelyn Waugh once argued, is that we have never put the clock back by even a single second. That’s probably because, as a mass democratic organisation, we have to respect public opinion. Full Article at Times Online