Don’t Make A Fuss
In August 1947 George Orwell nearly drowned himself, his infant son and his niece and nephew; and noticed some interesting activity by cormorants and puffins.
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Mariners’ Prayers
We may have left certain practices of our childhood and youth behind, but they haven’t gone away, you know.
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Lady Don’t Fall Backwards
We all know what is happening, but what will happen in the end? Keep turning those pages.
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Beastly Behaviour
The fables, Seamus Heaney has written, that corpus of tales of innocent or treacherous beasts and birds, were once part of the common oral culture of Europe, a store of folk wisdom as pervasive and unifying at vernacular level as the doctrines of Christianity were in the higher realms of scholastic culture.
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Filling in the blank
As a child, Nobel laureate Imre Kertesz was bought a beautiful notebook. So beautiful he didn’t want to write anything unworthy in it.
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Falling for makebelieve
Men and women, we were told in school, have been engineered by God to be attracted to each other and thus ensure the continuance of the human race. But perhaps there is a design fault.
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Gathering Dust
What are all those old books for anyway? Could you not get them out of the library? Do you ever read them? I never see you reading them.
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Bellow’s Gift
Saul Bellow judged that many people he knew had made too much of an investment in the difficult texts of Marxism to ever accept that it no longer had very much to say about reality. Can we say that about any later intellectual fashions?
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Google that, mister!
Rebecca Solnit is far from impressed by the corporate behemoth that owns everyone’s favourite search engine – and all its works, and all its pomps.
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Miss Austen’s Merits Debated
Miss Fox, of Fleet Street near Charing Cross, though of uncertain family, unknown fortune and indifferent parts, was a young woman of very definite opinions, many of them other people’s.