Henry Hitchings
Dripping with an Easy Sensuality…
What image do the words ‘book reviewer’ conjure? For me, thanks no doubt to George Orwell’s essay ‘Confessions of a Book Reviewer’, they bring to mind a bespectacled tea-drinking man who sits in a dressing gown at a wobbly table, surrounded by unpaid bills and volumes that bear inauspicious titles such as Tribal Customs in Portuguese East Africa.
A critic of this kind is inevitably jaded. (I shall use the words ‘reviewer’ and ‘critic’ interchangeably.) Among the more obvious vices of the jaded critic – or the merely talentless one – is lexical laziness. We are all aware of the argot of the more lethargic sort
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
'What they created in the neighbourhood resembled more a distillation of the High German culture of their past than a fresh start.'
@GeorgeProchnik tells the story of the German–Jewish intellectuals who settled in Jerusalem in the early 20th century.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/vienna-by-temple-mount
'Good translation is ... a refined art. It requires not just excellent language skills, but experience, emotional intelligence and enterprise as well.'
@Bridget_Kendall on how interpreters navigate the 'perilous waters of diplomacy'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/to-put-it-diplomatically
'Being an ambitious female artist working in the avant-garde was far from easy. Her art ... was found variously to be feminine, cold and artisanal'.
@TanyaHarrod on @EleanorClaytone's 'finely written study' of Barbara Hepworth.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/she-carved-her-own-way