Our book today is Ivy, the mighty Hilary Spurling’s enormous, definitive 1984 biography of the once-lauded and now completely forgotten Ivy Compton-Burnett. I recently re-read a few of Compton-Burnett’s twenty novels and was amazed all over again by their lean, acerbic, utterly original virtuosity. The lunging enthusiasm of that New Statesman reviewer over Pastors and [...]