SOURCE: Raphael, Frederic. “Biting the Hand That Rarely Paid for Lunch.” Spectator 281, no. 8887 (5 December 1998): 48.

In the following review, Raphael offers a positive assessment of Sir Vidia's Shadow.

Writers' friendships are often written on water; their enmities are chiselled in stone. Disillusionment and betrayal are harpies that sup on scraps. Dickens broke with Thackeray; Wain with Amis; Scott Fitzgerald with Hemingway. Ernest was probably the shittiest of the breed: he viciously parodied his mentor, Sherwood Anderson, for the trivially pressing reason that he needed to get out of a contract with the publisher they shared. In Madrid, during the Spanish Civil War, he tried to shop John Dos Passos to the NKVD, perhaps because he feared that his might be a more durable talent. Love affairs between authors can last, as is proved by the rapturous, pretty well unruptured mutual admiration of Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller (trust two...