Thursday, 16 May 2019

‘Chubby Boy’ Orwell’s Earworm . . . Rural Bard or Faltering Palimpsestic Balladeer . . . ?

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Has any Orwellian scholar, I wonder, checked the verses of their subject against the Suffolk heritage of his youth?  As it is, I believe t...
Wednesday, 8 May 2019

Stage Fright and Cage Fighting . . . a Parallel Universe of Freudian Terms.

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As have pointed out in a number of posts here, my admiration for the novelist,  Ethelind Colburn Mayne , one of the earliest translators of ...
Monday, 22 April 2019

Shaking Bell Towers of Notre Dame and the Deluge of Boiling Lead . . . ‘Built by a Magician’ claims the Duc d’Égypte . . .

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All eyes were raised to the top of the church. They beheld there an extraordinary sight. On the crest of the highest gallery, higher than th...
Saturday, 16 March 2019

D-r Tchékhov, Detektiv . . . the Problems of Englishing a Completist. Too anorakish?

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It is well-known that, like Kipling, Tchékhov prided himself on his hyperdetailed understanding of the habits, customs and manners of the to...
Saturday, 2 March 2019

From unpublished notebooks of L v. K

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In a deserted room the mirror shows  a hyacinth above the fireplace hyacinth fireplace a circumstantial...
Friday, 25 January 2019

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Lower than dirt Once I lived lower than dirt;  below, in the basement area, under the steps to my master’s front door. I woul...
Saturday, 12 January 2019

Priapus and a Dessication of Oxford Dons: Blake, Blunt and Hockney Eviscerated in the Master’s Lodge.

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Four months after les événements  in Paris, when attending a marketing meeting for the Autumn List of a venerable publishing house, I was wi...