Tuesday, 22 May 2012

A Droll Macaw with a Lyric Tongue.

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Isn’t it astonishing how the lyric voice can often spring from a fount of less than heroic proportions. I’m thinking of Swinburne here. ...
Monday, 21 May 2012

A Way of Seeing: Ronald Searle

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Having only this evening viewed a truly remarkable (and sobering) documentary on BBC2 TV, The Fall of Singapore: The Great Betrayal , I was...
Thursday, 17 May 2012

Mangled Frankenstein: the Perils of the e-Text.

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In four years’ time (2016) I shall be ready to commemorate the bicentennial of the birth of Frankenstein , when I intend to explode the myt...
Tuesday, 15 May 2012

‘They All Ought to be Hung’: a Minor Spat.

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Talking of Roger Casement being ‘hanged on a comma’, I am reminded of my recent spat with an admired American translator from the French of...
Monday, 30 April 2012

To Have and Have Not.

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I was SO pleased to have a text of mine published this year in the Winter issue of Ambit , particularly as I feared its subject was conten...
Wednesday, 28 March 2012

Catechisms and Cliché : Fatuous Minds Think Alike or Finishing School for Versifiers (part 1)

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I’m ashamed to admit I’ve taken agin a number of writers simply because, unknown to me, like Amundsen at the South Pole, they’ve trumped me ...
Friday, 23 March 2012

Two Tautologies : Right and Wrong?

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My long-held interest in Henry Harland, chameleon-like editor of the The Yellow Book (feigned Russian-born descent) led me to the British ...
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