READING AS BUTCHERY
Dr Johnson loved books. He loved to pull them apart, rip the heart out of them, devour them.
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OTHER PEOPLE’S TRADES
Being a writer can be and has been combined with many other activities, manufacturing paint and varnish for example.
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QUIXOTE IN WICKLOW
When exactly was it that Protestant ascendancy began to decay in Ireland? In WB Yeats’s eloquent speech in the Irish senate in 1925 on the divorce question, there is already a feeling of harking back to a more illustrious past, a sense that the great days are regrettably over: “We against whom you have done…
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VENICE, CITY OF PRINT
In the late fifteenth century, the republic on the Adriatic was Europe’s most flourishing centre of publishing.
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CHEKHOV’S HAMMER
“Behind the door of every happy, satisfied person,” wrote Chekhov in the story “Gooseberries”, “there ought to stand a man with a hammer whose constant knocking would be a reminder that there are unhappy people in the world, and that however happy he may be, life sooner or later will show him its claws and…
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MESSING ABOUT WITH RHYME
There was an old man of San Remo Whose verses were sometimes quite lameo. While his middle lines rhymed As their syllables chimed His first and his fifth were the sameo. Frank McNally, in The Irish Times, pays measured tribute to Edward Lear, who was born two hundred years ago today. … in general his limericks…
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MOVEABLE TYPE, REMOVEABLE TEXT
“The endless malleability of digital writing,” writes Nicholas Carr in the Wall Street Journal, “promises to overturn a whole lot of our assumptions about publishing.” “When Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type a half-millennium ago, he also gave us immovable text. Before Gutenberg, books were handwritten by scribes, and no two copies were exactly the same. Scribes…
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STORMING THE CITADEL
Italo Calvino, in his playful late novel (1979) If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, enters in the first chapter (or rather it is “you”, dear reader, who enters) a bookshop, with the settled purpose of buying Italo Calvino’s new novel, If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller ‑ hoping perhaps that it might be a bit better…
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WHEN BOOKS WERE BOOKS
Alan Bennett in the London Review of Books (July 28th) writes on the difficulty of presenting on stage a convincing library, library in this case meaning not the august municipal public institution, such as Armley Public Library in Leeds where Bennett says he was educated as much as at school, but a private collection of books, “someone’s…
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MIŁOSZ IN HEAVEN
Cynthia L Haven wrote in a recent Times Literary Supplement essay (November 23rd) about the wave of commemorations and celebrations that attended the hundredth anniversary this year of the birth of the great Polish poet Czesław Miłosz. Yet she emphasises the difficulties that many will have in understanding the now largely vanished world of religion and ideology…