Yes, says former Oxford professor Gabriel Josipovici. The fact that such writers had won so many awards was “a mystery”, Josipovici told the Guardian. He added: “It’s an ill-educated public being fed by the media – ‘This is what great art is’ – and they lap it up.” It is a view apparently now shared… Continue reading Are British Authors Overrated?
Anything he wrote was well worth reading, more than once. Prominent in literary criticism since the 1950s, Kermode held “virtually every endowed chair worth having in the British Isles”, according to his former colleague John Sutherland, from King Edward VII professor of English literature at Cambridge to Lord Northcliffe professor of modern English literature at… Continue reading Frank Kermode RIP
Bill Vallicella has a tough piece on Hitchens and his hope to live on in his works. For what he takes to be the illusion of immortality, Hitch substitutes literary immortality. “As an adult whose hopes lay assuredly in the intellect, not in the hereafter, he concluded, ‘Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and —… Continue reading On Literary Immortality
EVOLUTIONHunger that strivest in the restless arms Of the sea-flower, that drivest rooted things To break their moorings, that unfoldest wings In creatures to be rapt above thy harms; Hunger, of whom the hungry-seeming waves Were the first ministers, till, free to range. Thou mad’st the Universe thy park and grange, What is it thine… Continue reading Emily Pfeiffer
This afternoon’s speaker, Dame Gillian Beer, is the author of a book I very much want to read now, coming as I am (or have been for what seems an eternity) to the closing pages of a novel I’ve been working on myself.
