Monday, 16 August 2021

Review: Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

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  Reading a novel, you usually assume a stable text. But - consulting the notes to this edition in the course of reading - it became clear t...
Friday, 13 August 2021

Review: G K Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

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  To put it briefly, No. Late in life, G K Chesterton drew attention to the sub-title of this novel, A Nightmare, and it’s true that its ...
Friday, 6 August 2021

Review: Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South

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  Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855) often figures somewhere - though perhaps not very high up - on lists of  One Hundred Best Nove...
Friday, 30 July 2021

Review: Angie Schmitt, Right of Way

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  We Need to Talk About SUVs. The United Sates is, apparently, very wealthy but on a wide range of well-being indicators it scores poorly....
Monday, 26 July 2021

Review: Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

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  I admire Victorian novelists who scratched away with quills (later, steel pens) and candlelight to produce very long novels. True, the lon...
Tuesday, 13 July 2021

Should I Read William Empson's The Structure of Complex Words?

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  Oxford University Press has recently published scholarly editions of two books by William Empson (1906-1984): Some Versions of Pastoral ...
Saturday, 12 June 2021

Review: Duncan Minshull (Ed.), Sauntering: Writers Walk Europe

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  I bought this because I  read a favourable review and because I sometimes write essays which describe a walk. The book was a pleasure to...