Boris Ford

Boris Ford an emeritus professor of education at the University of Bristol, is the editor of the New Pelican Guide to English Literature and of the Cambridge Guide to the Arts in Britain. He is now editing a series of books on the arts and civilisation of the Western world.

Letter

Manly Decency

23 April 1992

It is not, as Mr Kinch surmises (Letters, 14 May), my imagination that runs away with me but, quite possibly, my memory. I had it from Dr Leavis himself that he often sat with Q in his study drinking his most excellent – whisky, I’m sure he said. But if Queenie Leavis says that her husband never would touch whisky, then what touched their lips was brandy. And I believe Leavis occasionally sipped...
Letter

The View from on High

24 February 1994

Towards the end of his excellent Diary on anti-Rushdie pathology (LRB, 24 February), Christopher Hitchens stated that on matters of blasphemy the Vatican, the See of Canterbury and the Rabbinate identify with the Ayatollah. This struck me as improbable, not least because identifying with the Ayatollah would imply sharing his view that blasphemy should be punished by death. I therefore wrote to the...
Letter

Doggerel

4 August 1994

Gerald Long’s assertion that ‘there are no limericks in French’ (Letters, 18 August) reminds me of a dilemma that faced me some years ago when I was invited to deliver the concluding speech at an Anglo-Canadian conference of adult educators. I was required to provide a commentary on the discussions held during the previous three days, and thus the speech had, in theory, to be composed at high...
Letter

The Good Old Days

26 January 1995

In his account of the political and ideological circumstances in which the Beveridge and Borrie Reports emerged. Ross McKibbin describes the remarkable ‘politicisation’ of many in the Forties ‘for whom overt political discussion had been hitherto unacceptable’ (LRB, 26 January). He attributes ‘the intensity of public discussion’ at that period in part, at least, to the publicity given to...
Letter

Gentle Questions

6 April 1995

Peter Wollen’s copiously documented article (LRB, 6 April) about Virginia Woolf’s involvements with British feminism, European Modernism and its attendant sexual revolution, and with her own social-intellectual milieu raised an uneasy question or two in my mind. For in the midst of his 630 lines there appear the following six: ‘James King’s new biography, punctilious but pedestrian, gives us...

Seeing through Fuller

Nicholas Penny, 30 March 1989

It has been respectable for some while now to admit to being bored by the huge, flat, ‘pure’ abstracts on the white walls of the museums of modern art. And yet non-representational...

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Textual Harassment

Claude Rawson, 5 April 1984

In a recent review in this paper, Edward Said used the word ‘narrative’ about thirty times. This might have seemed a lot even in the present state of litcritspeak, and even in an...

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Moments

Marilyn Butler, 2 September 1982

It is a current preoccupation on the Left, more fashionable now among many students of English than Post-Structuralism, that English Literature as an academic subject is a conspiracy of the...

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