Christopher Small

Christopher Small is a former literary editor of the Glasgow Herald. He has published books about Frankenstein, Orwell and the uses of the printed word.

Great Creatures

Christopher Small, 17 August 1989

Whitman doesn’t supply any of the fragments selected by Heathcote Williams to shore up his poems. You won’t find, in Leaves of Grass or elsewhere, more than passing allusion to whales or elephants. Williams, a child of the late 20th century’s technological manipulations and separations, looks long and longingly at animals, not so much as they swim or graze or galumph there within an observant loafer’s eye-range, as in books, photography, the shamelessly ingenious intrusions of the field-video. The catalogues of Sacred Elephant sometimes have a Whitmanesque cadence:

Letter

Blaming teachers

17 August 1989

It appears to me that Jane Miller’s spirited and indignant defence of schoolteachers (LRB, 17 August) is, as counter-attack, directed less against ‘tetchy pundits’ in the universities and elsewhere than against a government which by financial and other means has made education in the proper use of English more and more difficult. Professor Pole (Letters, 28 September) now returns, with the Government,...
Letter
In common with, no doubt, many other of your readers, I have been keenly looking forward to the London Review’s reaction, in due course, to the matter of Salman Rushdie – and have been proportionately disappointed by what appears in your current issue. Robert Fisk’s ‘Diary’ (LRB, 16 March) is an interesting footnote to the affair of The Satanic Verses, but it is hardly more, even with his...

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