News and reviews
Georg Forster reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement
Added on 27/03/2020
It is tempting to write the narrative of Georg Forster’s life as one of failure. The travel writer, essayist and political revolutionary died at the age of thirty-nine, impoverished, alone, and disillusioned in a Parisian garret in 1794.
READ MOREA Little History of Poetry reviewed in the Daily Mail
Added on 21/03/2020
Roughly 250 years ago, James Boswell asked Dr Johnson: ‘What is poetry?’ ‘Why sir, it is much easier to say what it is not,’ replied Johnson. ‘We all know what light is; but it is not easy to tell what it is.’
READ MORESebastian Faulks reviews A Little History of Poetry
Added on 15/03/2020
Last summer I tried to proselytise two people who said they couldn’t see the point of poetry. I read them extracts from Tennyson’s Ulysses, Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach and Charles Causley’s Eden Rock. They sat there stony-faced.
READ MOREA Little History of Poetry reviewed in the Evening Standard
Added on 12/03/2020
What is poetry? John Carey asks at the start of this brief but comprehensive (or, to put it another way, cursory) history of the whole world’s poetry, running from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the late Les Murray.
READ MOREA Little History of Poetry reviewed in the Times
Added on 04/03/2020
If you expected a book titled A Little History of Poetry to cutely recycle received wisdom about the literary canon, turn to page 50, where you will learn that many of Shakespeare’s sonnets “consist largely of complicated word-play…
READ MOREAn interview with John Carey in the Guardian
Added on 02/03/2020
The critic John Carey, 85, is emeritus Merton professor of English literature at Oxford University, where he taught for more than 40 years. He has written books about John Milton and John Donne as well as polemics against …
READ MOREFrench Fashion, Women, and the First World War reviewed in the TLS
Added on 29/02/2020
This collection of essays claims to be the first look at the Venn diagram of its subject matter. As Maude Bass-Krueger states in her introduction, “society held women to double standards when it came to getting dressed during the war”.
READ MOREThe Ruins featured in GQ’s 10 coolest things of the week
Added on 25/02/2020
The debut from Suede founding member and bassist Mat Osman is an altered state of a novel, mixing the crime of LA noir, the ambient cityscapes of JG Ballard and dark language games of Thomas Pynchon.
READ MOREMigrant City reviewed in the Spectator
Added on 24/02/2020
Every history of London — and there have been very many — has looked at the importance for the city of migration. Not to mention it would be as inconceivable as ignoring the River Thames. Both, after all, flow directly through the city’s heart.
READ MOREMigrant City reviewed in the Sunday Times
Added on 23/02/2020
Anyone curious about the impact of migration on the history and culture of London could do worse than read the chapter on food in this exhaustive history. The capital’s first coffee house was opened in the 1650s by an Armenian…
READ MOREMigrant City Book of the Week in the Evening Standard
Added on 21/02/2020
Fifteen minutes by train from Paddington, Southall is a “Little India” in the borough of Ealing. Set back amid the traffic in King Street is an ornate Hindu temple, and from the Punjabi stalls in Orchard Avenue you can buy jalebi.
READ MOREThe Lost Autobiography of Samuel Steward reviewed in the LRB
Added on 19/02/2020
By the time Samuel Steward began to write his autobiography in 1978, at the age of 69, he’d had sex more than four thousand times with more than eight hundred men. Each encounter was carefully recorded in his ‘Stud File’.
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