Category Archive: WRITING & LITERATURE
The Green Man
(by Kingsley Amis) The landlord of “The Green Man” pub has an alarming drinking problem and wandering hands. Also, there is some monolithic horticultural product about, that could cause further alarm. Amis senior’s famous book, Lucky Jim is superior to this slight work but this novella is so weird and perverse it is almost decadent.
Continue Reading →The Great Terror
(by Robert Conquest) It is hard to understand why so many intelligent people admired the socialist experiment of Soviet Union c. 1934-1940. These useful idiots defended and lauded systematic mass slaughter on an industrial scale. Conquest’s book, originally appearing in 1968, helped convince those still impervious to, inter alia, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The case is made, with solid and well sourced evidence, that Stalin basically topped anyone who looked at him sideways, or didn’t look at him, or whatever. Nor were the good and great spared: my battered 1971 Pelican edition has, as Appendix D, a list of Full and…
Continue Reading →God’s Funeral
Hardy is dead, but is God?
(by A.N. Wilson) A beautiful & rich review of Victorian and Edwardian thinking, as God’s life support was unplugged and how later generations may come, in time, to feel the need to apply resuscitation. As Kenneth Clark observed, heroic materialism and Marxism aren’t enough. We need something more.
Continue Reading →The Glass Bead Game
(by Hermann Hesse) Hesse’s ideation of his own life as a monk is a heavy but worthwhile read.
Continue Reading →The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress
(by Beryl Bainbridge) An odd, slight, oddly touching and slightly naff story of a road trip to oblivion, culminating in the death of RFK; but is the dysfunctional, libidinous Rose ‘the girl in the polka dot dress’ who exclaimed, ‘We shot him!’ as reported in the LA Times on 6 June 1968? Bainbridge’s last, almost finished novel is, unlike The Original of Laura, worth reading.
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