Seamus Perry

Seamus Perry is a professor of English at Oxford. He presents the LRB podcast series Close Readings, with Mark Ford.

Letter

A Stiff Examination

24 February 2022

I’m grateful, I suppose, to my friend Bernard Richards for correcting my error (Letters, 10 March). Henry James said of one of his characters ‘I really think I could stand a stiff cross-examination on that lady’ and not, as I had it, ‘sit a stiff examination’. So the remark is about forensic interrogation rather than the challenge of a three-hour paper. My gratitude is only complicated...
Letter

Žižeked

18 March 1999

In Alan Bennett’s Forty Years On there is a much wittier twist on Goering and his Browning than Malcolm Muggeridge’s reaching for his culture when he heard the word ‘gun’ (Letters, 29 April). It comes in the spoof memoir of Virginia Woolf’s literary soirées: ‘She was talking of her contemporaries, how she had spoken last week with Hemingway and how Ernest had said: When I reach for my...

The Terrifying Vrooom: Empsonising

Colin Burrow, 15 July 2021

Reading an Empson essay is like being taken for a drive by an eccentric uncle in a terrifyingly powerful old banger. There are disturbing stains on the upholstery and an alarming whiff of whisky in the...

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Alphabeted: Coleridge the Modernist

Barbara Everett, 7 August 2003

An informal Times feature on literary classics, published recently, included a list drawn up by a director of Penguin Classics: ‘The 50 Greatest Classics (pre-1900).’ Such lists can...

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