Don’t understand, just be afraid
After graduating from Columbia, John Berryman headed to Cambridge. ‘Yeats, Yeats, I’m coming! It’s me!’ a later poem has him exclaiming from the ship.
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Britain Brought To Book
Back in 1988, in a speech in Bruges, Margaret Thatcher laid down the law to the Europeans as to how they should run their show. She did at least acknowledge, however, that Europe was something with which Britain was connected.
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In Praise Of Ali Smith
Alex Clark pays tribute to novelist Ali Smith for her generous work on behalf of other literary practitioners, and in particular her championing of first-time authors.
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Misunderstanding Orwell
‘Nineteen-Eighty Four’ was first published sixty-six years ago today. Some people seemed to think that Big Brother was based on the unlikely figure of Clement Attlee.
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If at first you don’t succeed …
Ingeborg Rapoport was a recent medical graduate when she finished her doctoral thesis on diphtheria in Hamburg in 1938. But she was not allowed to submit it as her mother was of Jewish origin.
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Saul Bellow Brought To Book
Saul Bellow was not the first, but he was one of the earlier and most dominant of the Jewish writers who played such a big part in 20th-century American literature.
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Peter Gay: 1923 – 2015
Peter Gay, who fled Berlin with his family as a schoolboy, settling in the United States, was one of the most eminent historians of the Enlightenment. He was also a biographer of Freud and wrote other books on modern German and Austrian history.
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Slugging It Out
A new group, Historians for Britain, argues that Britain’s ‘special’ historical path means it should tell the EU to bog off. A rival group, Historians for History, argues that there is no such special path. There will be blood.
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Labour’s Scottish Woes
This week’s UK election is one of the most uncertain for decades. But one thing is sure: Labour will do disastrously in Scotland. And the likelihood is that that situation will persist until such time as the Scottish party can effectively assert its independence from the English one.
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Cheap and Cheerful
George Orwell thought that paperbacks were a good idea, particularly for the reader. But he also thought publishers and booksellers should combine to suppress them.