Set Down in Malice: A Book of Reminiscences

At the present moment there are only two names that are of vital importance in British creative music—Sir Edward Elgar and Granville Bantock. No two men could be in more violent...

I don’t know why, but for many years there has been (and I am told there still is) a kind of silent conspiracy to keep out of Fleet Street as many aspirants to journalism as pos...

It must have been five or six years ago that a friend came to me with the news that Frank Harris had expressed a desire to see some of my verse. Precisely what my friend had tol...

I wonder how many readers turn nowadays to the poetical works of Thomas Edward Brown, the Manx poet. Not a great number, I think. Indeed, I doubt if he ever had a large audience...

After what I have written you may find it difficult, if not altogether impossible, to regard me as a guileless youth. Yet I ask you so to regard me. For, if I be not guileless,...

One winter, about ten years ago, I went to Berlin in the company of Mr Frederick Dawson, the famous English pianist, who had planned to give two recitals there. We stayed at the...

If there is one thing more than another that the ordinary person cannot endure, it is to hear a man from Manchester praising his own city. Somebody from Leeds may tell him how b...

In the most tragic and most trying moments of life it is well to turn aside from one’s sorrows and refresh one’s mind and strengthen one’s soul by gazing upon the follies of oth...

Sir Herbert Tree never met a stranger without trying to impress him. He always succeeded. He would take the utmost pains about it: go to any lengths: use his last resource.... I...

Very many years have passed since, one cold winter’s afternoon, I met Edvard Grieg on Adolph Brodsky’s doorstep. A little figure buried, very deeply buried, in an overcoat at le...

But perhaps you have forgotten who Stanley Houghton was? Well, not so long before the Great War he was famous, both in England and America, as the author of _Hindle Wakes_, he w...

No; I’m not going to be a chronicler in this chapter. It sounds a dull subject, I know, but many things happened in Gloucester, Hereford and Worcester in mellow September days t...

I quite forget what particular concatenation of circumstances brought me into personal touch with Mr Arthur Henderson, M.P., but I rather think that when I waited for him at Wat...

Of all the famous writers I have met, I have found Arnold Bennett the most surprising. I do not know what kind of man I expected to see when it was arranged that I should meet h...

It was when I was a very young man indeed that I caught and succumbed to my first attack of Shaw-fever. I do not remember how I caught it; something in the Manchester air, no do...

My acquaintance with Hall Caine began in a semi-professional way. Whilst still a schoolboy, I was commissioned by _Tit-Bits_ to write a three-column interview with him. I wrote...

Not until quite recently has musical criticism been taken seriously either by the London or provincial Press. In the old days of the sixties, when Wagner came to London (I am wr...

Mrs Annie Besant, like her Himalayan Mahatmas, is lofty, remote, and difficult of access. Only once was I admitted to The Presence. What drove me there was, first of all, curios...

There is a prevalent opinion that Chelsea is the British counterpart of the Quartier Latin, but the resemblance each bears to the other is only superficial. The Quartier Latin a...

The weaknesses that seem to be inseparable from genius—and, most particularly, from artistic genius—are precisely those one would not expect to discover associated with greatnes...

It used to begin as a rumour, a faint stirring and excitement in King’s Road, Chelsea. The artist on the top floor of Joubert Studios—an artist who had a private income and a ge...

begged me to allow him to take it with him to France. He had a copy of his own, but he wished to take mine. That friend (our worship of Belloc was one of the many things we had...

Yvette Guilbert!... Yvette Guilbert! I suppose that only a writer who really can write can say anything useful or dignified about this most wonderful woman.... And yet I must tr...

I suppose that even the most outrageously sincere of men are to some extent _poseurs_, if not to themselves, then to other people. The artistic temperament must either attitudin...

seated in an open, horseless carriage, a dozen enthusiastic girls pulling at the shafts, a few ribald boys following and shouting small obscenities. I admired the perfect way sh...