Latest Blogs
Le livre est mort. Vive le livre
It would be naive to think that new media do not have an eroding effect on old, but traditional forms of reading are not dead yet.
First Catch Your Fairy Godmother
The London Review of Books is a marvel. Cool design, sharp opinion, cosmopolitan style, intellectual depth. How does it do it? Money.
Auden on good and evil
Doing good is all very well, but best to keep it to one’s self. Being good is a more slippery matter still, and the good man often shares a bed with the bad one.
Filthy Lucre
Money makes the world go round, but I think sensitive people like you and I can leave that to others.
A Fair Price
Classical and medieval thinkers had a great deal of difficulty coming to terms with the practices of merchants, shopkeepers and stallholders. ‘Five obols, guv, and I’ll throw in the amphora. Can’t say fairer than that.’
A New Novel from Mr Joyce
A hundred years ago Joyce’s Portrait first appeared in the magazine The Egoist.
A Grand Moan
The English know that nothing is really ever going to change, so, well, you have to larf, innit? But they are missing out on the far superior feelings of satisfaction and self-righteousness to be gleaned from denunciation.
Montaigne in Rome
Michel de Montaigne set out from France in the summer of 1580 on a long journey which was to take him through Switzerland, Germany and Austria, over the Alps and into Italy. Many things interested him in the life of the Rome of Gregory XIII, but he was struck by how little of the ancient city remained.
Seamus Heaney in Denmark
Bruce Clunies-Ross remembers a festive meeting of the poet, a Danish expert on sheela-na-gigs and PV Glob, the royal antiquary who wrote of Tollund Man, the natural warmth of the gathering further enhanced by glasses of a Danish spirit flavoured with bog myrtle and a variety of Tuborg made specially for the Danish court.
Foreplay
Handsome men are a dime a dozen, believe me. And what are they going to do? Sit on you, that’s what they’ll do. But Raymond Chandler, oh Raymond, Raymond. There was a guy who knew how to treat furniture.
The First World War – Who Done It?
Germany, like Britain, is seeing the publication of a slew of books on the hundredth anniversary of the Great War.
Blessing of the Animals, 1787
Goethe, visiting Rome, stumbled upon Neddy, Bluebell and Dobbin receiving the blessings of the Lord. It made his day.