My first book for the #1925Club was Gentlemen Prefer Blondes where Anita Loos makes several sly, satirical references to the journalist, critic and public intellectual H. L. Mencken. He is unmistakably the model for one of her characters and a source of some of the book’s humor. Mencken admired Loos’s wit and he was one of … Read more
Karel Čapek’s Letters from England (1925) “’You must begin from the beginning,’ I was advised, but as I have now been for ten days on this Babel of an island the beginning has got lost. What am I to begin with? Fried bacon, or the Exhibition at Wembley? Mr. Shaw, or the London policemen?” That … Read more
Here are two poems by H.D. neither of which were written in 1925 but both of which were included in her Collected Poems of that year. Storm You crash over the trees, you crack the live branch— the branch is white, the green crushed, each leaf is rent like split wood. You burden the trees … Read more
Agatha Christie’s “The Witness for the Prosecution”: Truth, Lies, and a Perfect Performance Christie published The Secret of Chimneys in 1925 and you can read an amusingly scathing review here. I am sure others may have more positive things to say. But Christie also published something else that year – a short story that has … Read more
“Richmal Crompton, I salute you.” That is the final sentence of Kate Atkinson’s afterword to her novel A God in Ruins. (2015). She is acknowledging, of course, her debt to Crompton’s William stories. Atkinson’s novel follows the life of Teddy Todd – would-be poet, bomber pilot, husband, father, and grandfather – as he navigates the … Read more
The Illuminating Diary of a Professional LadyReading Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes “A gentleman friend and I were dining at the Ritz last evening and he said that if I took a pencil and a paper and put down all of my thoughts it would make a book. This almost made me smile as what … Read more
“While sketching in the street, Eardley would set her easel up on a child’s pushchair. Andrew, then twelve, cheekily asked, ‘Do you want to paint me, missus?’ And she did. Ann remembers: ‘My mum said to Andrew, “I want to know where you’re going after school.” And he said, “I’m going to a woman’s house.” … Read more
Parody and Where Engels Fears to Tread “One always apologises for writing parodies; it is a disreputable activity, ranking only a little higher on the scale of literary activity than plagiarism. A minimum demand is that what is parodied be widely successful—a tulip craze of some sort. This gives the parodist the luxury of feeling … Read more
I keep returning to Unquiet Landscape: Places and Ideas in 20th Century British Painting because it’s that kind of book – one that invites rereading. Neve’s introduction is a guide to how to read the book which is not an art history survey of schools or influences, but a reminder that landscape painting is never … Read more
A recent post had the Rev. J. Alfred Prufrock at East Coker, dressed in plimsolls and meeting a merry band of assorted poets in East Coker. He commented on the season ( a cruel April) and suggested some stout to go with their lunch sandwiches. It seems a good time to give the T.S. Eliot … Read more
“For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?” – Mr Bennet in Pride and Prejudice Nicola Sturgeon, the divisive former First Minister of Scotland, has published her memoir Frankly. Far from a triumph, it has been met with scathing reviews from critics who see … Read more
Poetry and the landscape are changing – and the poets are on the move. On a train leaving Paddington, to be precise, on a Sunday in April c.1943, in a special carriage stuffed with them. Joseph Gurnard’s Poets’ Excursion is an extended metaphor of the shifting tide of British poetry and of the changing face … Read more
What if the man you’re rooting for in a wartime darkly comic thriller is also a serial killer? In Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper (1943), Donald Henderson gives us just that: a shabby, lonely public-school man with a bleak past, a murderer burdened by a morbid wish to be caught. (You can read the novel … Read more
My book arrived – hurray! Now I can get to work figuring out just whose noses Joseph Gurnard was tweaking in this delightful little burlesque from 1943, which pokes fun at the poets of the day and the shifting fashions of poetry. First, let’s be clear: this is no Roy Campbell-style slash-and-maim, burn-their-crops, ransack-their-houses takedown. … Read more
Refugees They have no need of our help So do not tell me These haggard faces could belong to you or I Should life have dealt a different hand We need to see them for who they really are Chancers and scroungers Layabouts and loungers With bombs up their sleeves Cut-throats and thieves They are … Read more