Thursday, 18 October 2012

Dead Wife, New Hat. (Femme morte, chapeau neuf.)

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Fish and guests smell at three days old , Anton Chekhov mused.     In truth, that year at Madame Lintvaryova’s country villa in the Ukrai...
Thursday, 20 September 2012

Great Dictators: Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Barbara Cartland, Edgar Wallace and Co.

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I have often thought that there must exist any number of recordings gathering dust made by those ‘great dictators’, the famous novelists o...
Friday, 29 June 2012

Le gérondif d’un fruit sec.

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That the writer looking for wriggle-room when attempting to compare the incomparable invariably finds a lexicon-defying escape hatch in the ...
Thursday, 28 June 2012

Thatlessness, Redundancy, Probability and Glitchiness.

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A lawyer, a specialist in Shipping and Transport, wrote to me recently, pointing out there are  precedents in Marine Law being cited and dis...
Friday, 8 June 2012

Fruits secs and the Napoleon of Over-Stippled Prose

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A recent fossicking in a rummage sale at a Cambridge country house brought to light a rare volume by that scourge of poetastry, eminent fra...
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...