Stephen Fry
Give Me Spots Any Day
A character in Christopher Hampton’s The Philanthropist once urged: ‘Don’t knock masturbation. Masturbation is the thinking man’s television.’ So now we know what you thinking men who don’t watch television are up to. And indeed we know what you are. It is to you that I address myself this week. Why don’t you watch television? You really should, you know. I have devoted this week to providing you with a starter’s course in television which I urgently recommend you to follow.
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I have just spent a wonderful few minutes re-reading the best book review of the year in my opinion. It's by Piers Brendon in September's issue of @Lit_Review. Beautifully captioned as 'Jack the Lad', Brendon takes Fredrik Logevall's JFK: Vol.I apart! It's a laugh a minute. Ouch!
'Perhaps the real modern polymaths are the hidden ones who do not themselves grab the limelight but have the expertise to bring together different fields of knowledge: librarians, teachers, editors of literary journals…'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/masters-of-none
Jan Morris, who died last week, was a much-loved contributor to our pages. In 2017, she wrote a characteristically witty article about the different winds, their various personalities and how they had touched her life: https://literaryreview.co.uk/let-it-blow.