Reading

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An in-depth investigation by Abi Kay has revealed that a food manufacturer was passing off huge quantities of foreign pork as British

Charles Lamb believed that books should be read, and that close reading could and should leave material traces. In an ironic piece on book-borrowers, he praised his friend Coleridge, who had returned Elia’s books ‘with usury; enriched with annotations, tripling their value’, though written ‘in no very clerkly hand’.

Its appeal is part of the recurrent cycle of the centripetal giving way to the lure of the burbs. Save that, in this instance, it’s not the lure that accounts for an invasion of beards and craft beer but the unaffordability of housing in East London. Let’s go to Croydon! For want of anywhere else.

It has always been​ said of George Meredith that, in the words of Oscar Wilde, ‘as a novelist he can do anything except tell a story.’ Arnold Bennett summarised the problem: ‘He wanders vaguely around. He gets lost. Even when going straight he often goes too slowly.’ 

Instead of being paid serious money, writers were treated to rituals of gratitude and expressions of friendship: lunches and launches. Long lunches were bonding ceremonies and a form of homage, ideally one o’clock to around four at a good restaurant, starting with a schooner of sherry, ending with a tulip-shaped glass of port, and two or three dishes in between, not including a luscious dessert or an aromatic cheese board.

In my horror and despair, in those first weeks, particularly when the systemic cruelty of the Russian military showed itself – not just towards civilians and the Ukrainian military, but towards its own troops – I was glad to see video of Russian hardware being destroyed. If it was not, it would kill more Ukrainians. I gradually remembered that inside the destroyed war machines were people.

The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 8 (Friday 31 March 2023)

Despite the romance figure of the female knight whose opponents mistake her for a man, women who engaged in real combat probably did so at a distance. They might collect stones to use as ammunition, hurl missiles from a tower, or operate siege engines in default of men, but it’s hard to be certain.

Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 8 (Friday 31 March 2023)

Watch for it, red staters Chris Cooper, a poli-sci professor at Western Carolina University, observes a GOP move you’ll likely see in your red-state legislature if you have not already. This one is from North Carolina. Republicans can’t have private donors who support democracy stepping in to prop up state and local Boards of Elections the GOP means to starve of funds. What? No mention of a Hungarian-American businessman in the bill? Attend your local Board meeting. It will likely come up among conspiracy theorists there. The GOP really is pulling out every stop to sabotage elections and undermine any of your rights they can get their hands on. Women’s rights, their personal autonomy and freedoms, are under assault too. You’ve noticed? North Carolina Republicans rolled out their abortion ban legislation on Wednesday too: RALEIGH, N.C. (WGHP) – Four Republicans in the North Carolina House have filed a bill that would ban legal abortion in the state except as necessary to save a mother’s life. House Bill 533 was filed Wednesday by state Rep. Keith Kidwell (R-Beautfort), its primary sponsor, Rep. Ben Moss (R-Moore), Rep.

Mary Renault’s novels manifest an unfashionably unabashed admiration for male heroism and an intense pleasure in male beauty and physicality. She didn’t mind that male readers and reviewers constantly misgendered her; ‘I’ve never been a feminist,’ she wrote to a female friend in the 1960s, ‘simply because all those years my inner persona occupied two sexes too indiscriminately to take part in a sex war.’

The reason last June’s massacre at Barrio Chino caused a scandal wasn’t that so many died there, it was that Spain can’t credibly distance itself from the deaths. That isn’t a problem when the bodies disappear beneath the waves. As Aimé Césaire once wrote, ‘Europe is indefensible.’

My will to preserve the faint aura of mystery surrounding early Duras at the height of the vogue for ‘écriture féminine’ responded to something essential in her late life persona as the grande dame of French letters, namely her constant myth-making, her blending of truth and fiction.

Stone hides itself in itself and thinks itselfInvisible. Its breathing is the near-death rhythmOf hibernation. There is nothing of this in the word stone; and everything. The word of God is stone....

In The World and All That It Holds, Aleksandar Hemon wants to show how the monolithic lays waste to the macaronic – and how the macaronic, in the form of the resilient Pinto, manages to survive. Yet Hemon is seduced again and again by the universal.

At sea things were classed as flotsam (any floating object), jetsam (cargoes deliberately thrown overboard) and lagan (sunken goods marked with buoys). But once something made landfall it became wreccum maris, wreck of the sea, and open to the competing claims of salvagers, coastal landlords and crown officials.

It would be naive to ignore the vulnerability of an organic constitution such as the UK’s to capture or erosion from within, when government contempt for both constitutional propriety and legality is barely disguised.

Why is there no ‘natural rate’ of profit, poverty or inequality beyond which we shouldn’t go? To say that economics is political isn’t to say it is conniving or ill-willed, but merely that, like any form of knowledge aimed at understanding a complicated world, it is intensely social.

The Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña is interested in art as protest and in protest as spectacle, but she seems as insistent on possibility as on past wrongdoing. This is a gentle environment in which to broach extinction.

‘I am, always was, and always will be violently optimistic,’ Preston Sturges said. ‘I knew at twenty that I was going to be a millionaire. I know it today. In between times, I have been.’ The violent optimism arose from the life. It sets the tone of the autobiography, and of the films.

In memory of Charles SimicThat the Gallic tribes were the ‘people of the hills’(sharing an Indo-European root with collis),is an idea wherein their heirs in the Eastern Catskillsstill...

The neglected details of Gautam Adani’s frictionless rise show how, after their calamitous romance with Russia’s oligarchy, Western politicians, journalists and bankers have facilitated the ascent of another hyper-nationalist elite with dubiously sourced wealth and an extreme aversion to the rule of law and civil liberties.