![]() ![]() ![]() Aickman also shared with Nabokov a wide culture and a pervasive nostalgia for a lost world: in Nabokov's case pre-revolutionary Russia, in Aickman's case the England of the Edwardians and late Victorians. His prose style is inimitable and unforgettable as erudite and urbane as Nabokov's, without the verbal flashiness and the cheap in-jokes. Opinions will vary over which ten or a dozen, but a book which included "Ringing the Changes", "The Swords", "The Hospice", "Into the Woods", "The Same Dog", "Meeting Mr Millar" and "Ravissante" would rank among the greatest weird collections ever published. Of his forty-eight stories, at least ten or a dozen - a rather high percentage - are authentic masterpieces. ![]() The first of these, The Attempted Rescue, gives a poignant account of his upbringing in a thoroughly unhappy home on the fringes of the British aristocracy. During his lifetime he published forty-eight stories, mostly of long-story to novella length a novel called The Late Breakfasters which is more or less unobtainable and two volumes of autobiography. Today is the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Robert Aickman, the author of some of the best weird fiction of the twentieth century. ![]()
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