Insular Cosmopolitan
Publisher Christopher MacLehose remembers a time when emigres were prominent in London publishing and work in translation was far from unusual.
-
-
THEIR INTELLECTUALS AND OURS
An American academic finds the people he meets abroad more interesting and more widely knowledgeable than his colleagues and peers at home.
-
FOUR LEGS GOOD
George Orwell’s sister found that while pigs might be wonderful symbols they were also not bad eating.
-
THE BEATEN DOCKET
Ideas are not cost-free, argues Ronald Aronson. They have consequences, and we cannot shrug our shoulders about those and say ‘nothing to do with me’.
-
DRESSED TRIPE AND TIPSY FIGS
The American writer James Salter, in a piece entitled “Michelin Man” collected in the volume Eat Memory: Great Writers at the Table, traces his first connection with French food to the New York World’s Fair in 1939, which featured a restaurant at the French pavilion that everyone talked about but where few managed to get a…
-
WAUGH IN ABYSSINIA
Evelyn Waugh went to Abyssinia as a war reporter in 1935, where he mostly missed the war but thought the Italians were doing a good job of spreading civilisation in darkest Africa.
-
PHILIP LARKIN IN WEST BELFAST
The young poet arrived in Ulster’s capital in 1950 and soon got his first glimpse of the province’s great tradition of sectarian politics.
-
THE COPY EDITOR AS SEX GOD
Michael Fassbender and Colin Firth are to join forces in a new film which will show the true glamour and romance inherent in the job of changing words on a page.
-
THE ARCHIVIST OF AFFRONTS
Claudio Magris’s account of a stubborn chronicler of the copious inconvenience of living.
-
POLITICAL POETS
Beware of poets’ mere opinions or opinionating, writes David Wheatley. Many construct whole personae to this end, while secretly defying the reader to see them awry, in an entirely different light.