Ian Hamilton once ended a batch review by saying a slim volume ‘had a nice cover’, but 1890s poet John Gray suffered the even worse indignity of a critic praising ‘the beauty of the margins’.
Reading Scotus Eriugena’s Greek-language poetry, writes his editor, is like watching Agamemnon take communion from the Patriarch of Constantinople.
A painting produced in youth (c. age 10).
Delighted to learn that the title of volume ten of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time derives from a scene where the rackety littérateur Lindsay Bagshaw wants to check a quotation in Palgrave's Golden Treasury, pulls a bookshelf down on top of himself, and says 'Books do furnish a room'.
‘Could he have been that bad?’, asks my Dad of a review of Ackroyd’s Auden, which recommends a strong moral recoil from that poet on the grounds of, inter alia, egregious snot-eating.
An ivory chariot drawn by leopards: on Michael Field.
brandnewcarnation.substack.com/p/an-ivory-c...
David Hockney has sadly died so here is one of Conor O’Callaghan’s numerous poems on swimming pools.
A short essay of mine on Cavafy.
brandnewcarnation.substack.com/p/dont-hope-...
A good pub quiz question would be, what masterpiece of modern Irish writing was bankrolled by a British high-street department store. The answer is Stephen MacKenna’s remarkable translation of the Enneads, sponsored by Sir Ernest Debenham.
Listing on the Suhrkamp website says this is finally coming out this summer. 1348 pages too, no less.
www.suhrkamp.de/rights/book/...
