The Faber book of writers on writers - Sean French

There is a special frisson when great writers meet, and when one - or both of them - records the event, the result can be full of insight, or bitchiness, but is rarely straightforward. This collection of such meetings includes Philip Roth dashing the hopes of a dying Bernard Malamud; Virginia Woolf glimpsing D. H. Lawrence on an Italian railway platform from a passing train; Ben Jonson on Shakespeare; Hazlitt on Coleridge; T. S. Eliot on Joyce; Evelyn Waugh on Graham Greene; Arthur Miller on Saul Bellow; and Martin Amis on Nicholson Baker. As W. H. Auden observed, writers have no small talk when they meet; as shown here, this frequently leads to fireworks.