Keith Walker

Keith Walker teaches English at University College, London.

Settling accounts

Keith Walker, 15 May 1980

‘A heart for every fate’: the title Marchand has chosen, from the enchanting lyric Byron wrote to Thomas Moore in 1817, doesn’t seem quite appropriate. It would have been better to borrow Doris Langley Moore’s Lord Byron: Accounts Rendered, for in these months in Genoa (October 1822 – June 1823) Byron was settling his accounts with his creditors, with his public, with his publisher John Murray, with his mistress, and making arrangements to settle his accounts with life and fame. Late in this volume we see Byron discussing a collected edition of his poems with J.W. Lake. Elsewhere Byron says he wants to amass enough money to be able to leave something to his sister Augusta and her children, and to contribute to the Greek cause. He laughs at himself in assuming the role of miser: ‘I am economizing – have sold three horses and pay all bills in person – keeping a sharp look out – on the candle’s ends.’

Johnson’s Business

Keith Walker, 7 August 1980

‘DULL. adj. 8. Not exhilaterating; not delightful; as, to make dictionaries is dull work.’ But they are fun to read, and it’s good to welcome this reprint of Johnson’s first edition (1755).

Letter
Keith Walker writes: Mr Kojecky’s speculation is ingenious, but there are too many similar puzzles about Johnson’s Dictionary which it wouldn’t solve, and everything we know about the circumstances of the making of the Dictionary is against it. Mr Kojecky apparently relies on Boswell’s description, which is confused and misleading on important details. For example, Boswell suggests that Johnson...
Letter

Patrons

15 October 1987

SIR: With the dollar at, say, $1.50 to the pound and assuming ‘$2995’ is a misprint for $29.95 (sorry to point these things out), the books reviewed by Peter Burke (LRB, 15 October) come to about £300. Did you also pay him?
Letter

Language Fears

19 January 1989

Professor Nash’s recent review of the Greenbaum/Whitcut Longman Guide to English Usage, though properly welcoming, does less than justice to those areas where the book is unique. 1. The Guide can cause students to fall off their chairs with laughter. Nash has mentioned the keen distinction drawn between weak and week (‘Weak means “not strong". A week is seven days’), but he doesn’t give the...

Poet Squab

Claude Rawson, 3 March 1988

There is an anonymous portrait of Dryden, ‘dated 1657 but probably 1662’, which shows a full-fed figure with plump alert eyes, comfortable and predatory. He seems poised between...

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Wadham and Gomorrah

Conrad Russell, 6 December 1984

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, one of the original ‘amorous sons of Wadham’, perhaps took part in writing an obscene farce called Sodom. Dr Walker drily observes that ‘to...

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