![]() ![]() To John Betjeman, for example, five years his junior, a Marlborough schooling was a mark of wilful middle-classness. The family passports were straightaway altered to "Sir William and Lady Golding", while his journal takes a positive pride in what Carey calls "the grovelling attentions" of hotel managers and head waiters. Gong duly trousered, Golding's response to his newfound status was almost comically triumphal. "Are you kultivating my K?" ran a postcard to Faber's managing director, Matthew Evans. The secretary of state for education, at work on a book for Golding's publishers, had been nobbled at a banquet. Highly placed friends had been instructed to lobby. It had been preceded by some backstairs manoeuvring of a practically Trollopean cast. As John Carey notes, in one of this excellent biography's most amusing passages, the news was not altogether unheralded. ![]() Now, in the Queen's Birthday Honours List, followed the announcement of his knighthood. ![]() He had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature five years before. ![]() The apotheosis of William Golding's career probably came on 11 June 1988. ![]()
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