Category: books
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Stonehenge, pictured by a member of the family in August, 2010. Stonehenge, in virtue of the simplicity of its plan, and its good preservation, is as if new and recent; and, a thousand years hence, men will thank this age…
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A woman is sitting at home alone, one Saturday morning just before midday, when, unexpectedly, a knock comes at the door. On opening the door she finds, much to her surprise, an old friend whom she has not seen for…
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[More about Eadweard Muybridge here.] Nicholas Royle in The Uncanny (2003) answers: It is usually traced back to 1876, to a man called Boirac who wrote: ‘It has happened that, seeing for the first time a monument, a landscape, a person,…
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In today’s Guardian, twelve writers write about their favourite short stories. Jeanette Winterson pens a beautiful description of Italo Calvino’s “The Night Driver” (from his 1967 collection t zero). I couldn’t find a link to it so I’m typing it…
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In her hugely enjoyable book, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (first published in 1994 — mine is the Vintage’s 1995 version) the mythographer, novelist and historian Marina Warner answers: The earliest extant version of ‘Cinderella’ to…
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–Samuel Johnson in The Rambler (1750) answers: If a life be delayed till interest and envy are at an end, we may hope for impartiality, but must expect little intelligence; for the incidents which give excellence to biography are of…
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–A.D. Nuttall in Overheard by God: Fiction and Prayer in Herbert, Milton, Dante and St John (1980) answers: Greek tragedy owes its special force to the stratified coexistence of two ethical worlds. The older stratum is one in which men…
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––In a discussion of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, Harold Bloom (2004) answers: Since Innocence and Experience are states of the soul through which we pass, neither is a finality, both are necessary, and neither is wholly preferable…
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Peter Ackroyd’s The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983) is a fictional memoir of Wilde, written (supposedly) between 9 August 1900 and his death on 30 November that year. In the book, Wilde writes in a letter to a friend, ‘the…
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In The Grand Design: New Answers to the Ultimate Questions of Life (2010), co-written by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow: The Chinese tell of a time during the Hsia dynasty (c. 2205-c.1782 BC) when our cosmic environment suddenly changed. Ten suns appeared in…
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This post was originally written on 9th September, 2009. Foyles Bookstore, London Tonight we saw John Banville (who is also Benjamin Black) at a free author’s talk organised by the Foyles Bookstore. In the event, Banville discussed his latest novel,…
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“It was on account of these things that mamma got her for such low pay, really for nothing: so much, one day when Mrs. Wix had accompanied her into the drawing-room and left her, the child heard one of the…
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James Wood (2008) answers: The kind of metaphor I most delight in […] estranges and then instantly connects, and in doing the latter so well, hides the former. The result is a tiny shock of surprise, followed by a feeling…
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–Ian McEwan (2001) answers: [I]t was the visual impression of an even deeper darkness beyond the light that drew them in. Even though they might be eaten, they had to obey the instinct that made them seek out the darkest…
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Outside lands contiguous with China, emigration has never been promoted by the Chinese state. The spread of Chinese cooking around the world has therefore been colonial but not imperial, carried by peaceful migrants in self-imposed “economic exile.” At least, this…
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Felipe Fernandez-Armesto answers: For almost uniquely, in the repertoire of modern Western cuisine, the oyster is eaten uncooked and unkilled. It is the nearest thing we have to “natural” food—the only dish which deserves to be called “au naturel” without…
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Who doesn’t like Montaigne (1533-1592), the very man who invented the essay genre? His writings are fun, wise, philosophical, sometimes provocative. He says these things: “If ordinary people complain that I speak too much of myself, I complain that they…
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In Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus (2005), Penelope,1 Odysseus’s oh-so-loyal and virtuous wife, is dead. Hell is her current domicile. That does not stop her from telling the readers, who live in the modern age…
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Parts of this post were first written on 28th January and 1st May, 2010. Updated and expanded on 18th November, 2010.Adam and Eve This is an image from the wonderful Ebstorf Mappamundi, a Medieval European map of the world created in…
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William Empson (1961) answers: Line references are to the nearest factor of five, because factor of ten are usually given in the margin of the text, and the eye can then find the place without further calculation. The show of…
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A.D. Nuttall (2003) answers: The word, I think, connotes a quality of completeness: at the lowest level, complete literacy (never a colon where a comma should be); complete, though not redundant documentation; complete accuracy even with reference to matters not…
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Parts of this post were first written in March this year (9th March and 11th March). Revised on 17th November, 2010. Recently, I read Melanie Benjamin‘s Alice I Have Been (2009), which is a fictional account of the life of…
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This post was originally posted on 18th July, 2009. – Today we went shopping in the upmarket neighbourhood of Chelsea. Our first stop was the famous John Sandoe Bookstore. The store, which sells new books, is absolutely packed, much more…
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This post was originally written on 18th April, 2009. Today, the webmaster told me a story from Greg Egan‘s Axiomatic. The story, “The Hundred Light-Year Diary”, is about a future invention that allows people to send messages to themselves from…
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