A new memoir by the American novelist Edmund White, the specialist in same-sex attraction novels, has been published and is reviewed in the latest Spectator. It's called The unpunished vice. Don't get too excited, the subtitle is A life of reading. White is an interesting person in so many ways. Like quite a few other American writers and artists he spent some years living in Paris. I suppose that having struggled with one foreign language all their life (English), learning another one (French) doesn't seem so daunting to those Americans

White reveals that one of the two books he re-reads every year is "Nothing by Henry Green, a dandy novelist who appeals for his ‘cattiness, strategic artifice and stylish doubletalk’". A review of Nothing concludes "As the plot advances through discussions filled with misdirections and omissions, Green demonstrates that there is nothing like the spoken word to conceal one’s true intentions". Sounds like a writer after my own heart