Set Down in Malice: A Book of Reminiscences

The title promises mischief, and Gerald Cumberland delivers. This collection of personal essays and reminiscences offers something rarer than mere celebrity memoir: actual intimacy with the famous, delivered without reverence. Cumberland knew playwrights, political activists, and musicians of the early 20th century, and he's not interested in preserving their monuments. Instead, he paints them as they were prickly, strange, brilliant, and often absurd. The humor is sharp, the observations candid, and there's a particular pleasure in watching a writer who clearly delighted in human peculiarity turn his attention to the great and powerful. This is literary gossip of the highest order, the kind that reveals character rather than destroys it. For readers who have ever suspected that biographies sanitise their subjects, Set Down in Malice offers the corrective: a memoir written by someone who actually sat across the table from these figures and remembered what they ate, what they said, and what they were like when no one was performing.