Jeremy Treglown
A Clockhouse of One’s Own
Reading a book or a poem in the place it’s about: it’s an obvious thing to do, if only one step less irrational than carving your initials on a writer’s birthplace. But what has reason got to do with it? Imagined approximations, talismanic associations: they do have power. In a chuck-out box in the porch of an Oxford second-hand bookshop, I once found a paperback of Stendhal’s De l’amour, inscribed ‘I Murdoch, Somerville, 1938’. I gave it to someone but feel fonder of it in memory than of almost any book still on my shelves.
It’s unclear, all the same, quite what one is doing, say, lugging Don Quixote around La Mancha. The story is no less obvious and repetitious in Spain than anywhere else. Perhaps there’s a hope that, like some kinds of wine and
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'There are at least two dozen members of the House of Commons today whose names I cannot read without laughing because I know what poseurs and place-seekers they are.'
From the archive, Christopher Hitchens on the Oxford Union.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/mother-of-unions
Chuffed to be on the Curiosity Pill 2020 round-up for my @Lit_Review piece on swimming, which I cannot wait to get back to after 10+ months away https://literaryreview.co.uk/different-strokes https://twitter.com/RNGCrit/status/1351922254687383553
'The authors do not shrink from spelling out the scale of the killings when the Rhodesians made long-distance raids on guerrilla camps in Mozambique and Zambia.'
Xan Smiley on how Rhodesia became Zimbabwe.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/what-the-secret-agent-saw