Ian Patterson is the author, most recently, of Books: A Manifesto.
J.H. Prynne has always seemed to me to represent the real potential of poetry, as an art that can encompass everything, every kind of feeling and every element of knowledge, and shape it into a form that affects its readers in a way that nothing else can.
Once at a gate with cherries. Know this quickly buried nowor less to file history brief stuffed full of pen force, the timeit takes to various accounts echoing in my library to ensurepassage broke the last moment fall to tout trees demand skin
bite raw love font for bodies of water. Slip meaning work orwalk grey weight access to immediate profit, little pamphlets dovoices and lead stone by...
It’s always a shock when imagined characters from novels are given a kind of reality by TV actors. Everybody has their own idea of Mr Darcy or Leopold Bloom, Mrs Dalloway or Emma Bovary, and most incarnations will upset somebody. It does seem perverse, though, to change as much about the characters’ appearance as Disney’s adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s best novel, Rivals, has done.
‘Since this trouble with my back, I’ve read all the detective stories there ever were, I should think,’ a character says in Agatha Christie’s Peril at End House. ‘Nothing else seems to pass the time away so quick.’ My back is OK but I’ve spent the last 15 months reading detective fiction, most of it written between the late 1920s and the mid-1950s, an...
Its very silhouette was an echo of fancy paintapproached on time, I thought, to drive hands downthe throat in a second with nothing much to tell
Off in a whistle soon she was forced to write his typeso what must scarcely exist was drawn and died freeof air and local looks back into the time of this.
Better ventures rock in flat belief and he loves thefeeling used by lines to remind...
What was it Proust said about paradise? That all paradises are lost paradises? That the only true paradise is a lost paradise? That it isn’t paradise until it’s lost? That paradise is...
In April 1984 President Mitterrand gave a press conference unlike any that had previously been held under the Fifth Republic. He did not sit at a sombre bureau Louis XV decorated with red, white...
Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.
For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.