Same old, same old: the struggle for representation

I spent a couple of days in London at the end of last week. Socks for the Boys! was shortlisted for the Tony Lothian Prize for an unpublished first-time biography and I was invited to the Biographers’ Club Prize Dinner at the Liberal Club in Whitehall Place (very posh, as my great aunts would say, the ‘o’ pronounced as in ‘post’).  I was really delighted to be shortlisted; to see Norah take her place amongst the royals and assorted aristocrats, the Bloomsbury-ites and Romantics of previous shortlists, was very very satisfying.  One of the judges, Lara Feigel, praised the ‘wonderful immediacy’ of Norah’s diary entries and read the ‘Lovely among the boys’ sequence from September 1938.  (You can see the full shortlist – and indeed the winner, Polly Clark, who is doing creative things at the interface of history, memoir and biography – here).

I also used the opportunity of this trip…