Romancing: The Life and Work of Henry Green by Jeremy Treglown
Henry Yorke led a double life. Under his own name he was managing director of his father's engineering company; as Henry Green he was the author of some of the most remarkable novels of his time, proclaimed by Auden as 'the finest living English novelist', and by Angus Wilson as 'one of the few really considerable English novelists of our time'.Romancing tells the story of a man once described as possessing 'a strange mix of dash and melancholy', who listed just one recreation in Who's Who: 'romancing over the bottle, to a good band'. It explores his aristocratic upbringing; his time at Oxford, where his contemporaries included Evelyn Waugh and his tutor was C.S. Lewis; his period as a firefighter in the Blitz; his flirtations; his final years as a recluse; and above all his writing.