Jonathan Mirsky
Dining at Lizard’s Thicket
Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads
By Paul Theroux
Hamish Hamilton 441pp £20 order from our bookshop
I read this inspiring and depressing book a few weeks after a young man in Charleston, South Carolina, sporting Confederate flag images and apartheid slogans, and using a gun given to him by his father for his birthday, shot dead nine black churchgoers. Their families forgave the killer. The Confederate flag that had been flying over the state house was finally hauled down and consigned to a museum.
I say depressing because what Paul Theroux learned in his year-and-a-half drive through the Deep South is
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'It remains a poem comprised of clay fragments, short and long, and though the desert delivers up occasional additional text, we are a long way from a whole poem.'
Michael Schmidt on the oldest surviving poem in the world.
http://ow.ly/7OLF50xqr91
'Apparently if you’re a teenager and you send a declaration of love to someone heart emoji, heart emoji, heart emoji and they come back smiley face, that’s the worst.'
Thomas Blaikie tries to get his head round the language of the internet.
http://ow.ly/TU6d50xroRc
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