Great Literary Friendships Janet Phillips (Bodleian, £16.99)
Imagine our debt of gratitude to Ezra Pound, who edited a young poet and made him dump ‘He Do the Police in Different Voices’ and instead call his long poem The Waste Land. Bless Maxwell Perkins who rejected ‘Under the Red, White and Blue’ and insisted on The Great Gatsby. Which gets me to the book at hand.
I fell for it immediately. Not for the cover (more decorative than bookish), but because I already have two volumes on the subject, The Company They Kept: Writers on Unforgettable Friendships, in which writers describe the personal and intellectual relationships they’ve had with fellow writers and artists—Seamus Heaney on Thomas Flanagan, Joseph Brodsky on Isaiah Berlin: a literary wander into private lives without feeling prurient.
I thought that Great Literary Friendships would be more of the same, but it’s not. These friendships are created by the writer and live in the pages of novels and plays. If this sounds rather academic (the author is an editor at Bodleian Library Publishing— her modest biography was nine words long, including her name), don’t worry. A few pages in you feel as if you are in the company of a sprightly, charming, wellread friend who has read—and re-read during lockdown—many books you have read, quite a few you’ve meant to read and a few you’ll give a miss. You also realise early on that she reads more attentively than you do.
Denne historien er fra February 16, 2022-utgaven av Country Life UK.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
Allerede abonnent ? Logg på
Denne historien er fra February 16, 2022-utgaven av Country Life UK.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
Allerede abonnent? Logg på
Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
