Nige salutes the extraordinary lit-crit of Christopher Ricks... Despite the heat having knocked out most of the thinking parts of my brain, I've been reading (technically re-reading, as I read it when it came out some 40 - 40! - years ago) Christopher Ricks's Keats and Embarrassment. It presents the poet's ... Read More...
Literature
Steerforth discovers a once-popular but now largely forgotten thriller writer with a unique way with words... The truth is that even the most experienced and well-qualified second-hand booksellers know bugger all about most of the titles that we sell. Much of the time, we are not selling Eliot (George or T. ... Read More...
Keats, Chatterton, Shelley, Byron, Wollenstone, Burns... they all died in their prime. But what would it have meant, for art and for the world, if they had lived their full three score and ten? Professor Nick Groom offers a counterfactual history of the long-lived Romantics... What would have happened if John ... Read More...
In this exclusive extract from Slightly Foxed's quarterly magazine, Andrew Hall examines the unusual literary career of J.L. Carr, a 'back-bedroom publisher of large maps and small books who, in old age, unexpectedly wrote six novels'... In July 1967 the schoolmaster and part-time novelist J. L. Carr took two years’ leave ... Read More...
Of course Michael Gove didn't actually ban any American books from schools, but that didn't stop a good argument about British and American literature. Rita weighs in... Two contrary news stories from Britain caught this librarian’s attention recently as they both have to do with books. First was education minister Michael ... Read More...
What if all that we see or seem takes place in a sea beneath a sea, beneath a sea...? Fans and devotees of Spongebob Squarepants (yes, I’m raising my hand) will recall that while the town of Bikini Bottom itself is located underwater it nevertheless borders a sort of sea-under-the-sea. At ... Read More...
Can reading fiction ever really be justified when there are so many more 'important' things in the world? Douglas ponders a question that occasionally troubles all bibliophiles... My first year of college I took a course in Arthurian literature. There were fewer than ten of us in the class. After a ... Read More...
What's in a name? Introducing Denkof Zwemmen, who knows a thing or two about pseudonyms... Back in 1963, when I was a smart-ass 24-year-old and had just moved from New York City into a farmhouse near my hometown of Poughkeepsie, and the phone company asked me in what name I wanted ... Read More...
I set my lip on fire the other morning. No of course I didn’t, I’m plagiarising Derek because I can’t think of a better diary opening than his, and because I haven’t done anything very exciting since my last missive, though I did attend a corporate awards night at the ... Read More...
A treat for you today,as the great Jonathan Law reflects on hawthorn blossom, Ruskin's dark secrets and the death of a maiden... According to W.G. Hoskins in The Making of the English Landscape, the hawthorn hedges of England are to be seen in their full splendour on one particular date – ... Read More...
