Peter Washington
Empires of the Mind
UNLIKELY AS IT seems, senior Tories pondering the problem of how to revive their party’s fortunes in the great industrial cities and Celtic outlands could do worse than to read this book about the poet-painter David Jones. His story shows how one individual Briton in the twentieth century was able to re-imagine British history in ways which are culturally diverse and demotic, yet profoundly patriotic and conservative. How many radical artists, I wonder, can be said to have ahred Nevllle Chamberlain?
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Perception is a weird thing. Lawrence Durrell saw Hydra as a ‘great horned toad’ but Henry Miller thought it resembled a ‘huge loaf of petrified bread’. Niko Ghika painted it as a series of neat white and orange squares.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-call-of-the-wine-dark-sea
The minimalist Fumio Sasaki 'confesses that as he began to purchase fewer consumer goods, his meals shrank in size. He decluttered and lost weight. Accumulation is not just an economic way of life but a form of embodiment too. Enlightenment is reduction.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/gardens-of-emptiness
'The river’s desecration mirrors Colombia’s long history of violence: "for years we treated it like a sewer," says Ahmed, a survivor of a particularly brutal paramilitary massacre, "just like we treated each other".'
Patrick Wilcken on the Magdalena.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/troubled-waters-3