Rare Books
Inside outsider : the life and times of Colin MacInnes
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- Description
- "During the 1950s and 1960s, Colin MacInnes established a unique and formidable reputation as a novelist, as an Orwellian chronicler and interpreter of the then unfamiliar worlds of the teenager, of pop music, and of Britain's black community, and as a homosexual who combined prickliness and a drunken belligerence with a sympathetic championing of the underdog. Tony Gould got to know MacInnes towards the end of his life; and he has now written an affectionate but unillusioned biography that is riveting as the account of an extraordinary life, and remarkably evocative of the life and culture of the Fifties and Sixties. MacInnes's adult life represented, perhaps, a reaction against a an astonishing family background: his father was a professional singer with a weakness for the bottle; his mother was the steely Angela Thirkell, whose novels were permeated with a resentful nostalgia for the world in which she had grown up. Burne-Jones was his grandfather, and family cousins included Kipling and Stanley Baldwin; yet when MacInnes was a small boy the family decamped from Kensington to Australia, and he grew up in Melbourne, only returning to England in his late teens. Tony Gould succeeds magnificently in evoking the very different worlds of the Edwardian intelligentsia, Australia in the 1920s, and London's post-war Bohemia - and a writer whose often repellent character and habits seemed oddly at variance with his perceptive and sometimes prophetic insights into the society in which he lived"--From dust jacket.
