Richard Ingrams
A Dish of Sweetcorn
I set out thinking I wasn’t going to enjoy Garrison Keillor and his tales of Lake Wobegon. American, sentimental, nostalgic, corny, ‘Thurberesque’ – his world, as described by critics, seemed to have all the ingredients likely to deter a hard-bitten and frivolous Englishman. But the Americans have a wonderful way of winning one over and they do it with their sincerity. Keillor may be sweetcorn but there is nothing phoney about him.
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Only the Summer double issue (July/August) of @Lit_Review Lots of great summer reading.
'Like many a subsequent empire, Rome had a highly ambivalent relationship with the outsiders it needed to fuel its commerce, stock its slave markets and man its armies.'
@PParkerAuthor on the rise and fall of Alaric the Goth.
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'Of all modern English poets, Larkin is perhaps the one with whom most readers feel some imaginative affinity, a sense of having lived in the same world, with the same streets, the same unvoiced longings and anxieties.'
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