Rupert Christiansen
Ladies and the Tramp
When the mad Major in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies writes his daughter a fabulously large cheque, he invalidates it by appending the signature ‘Charlie Chaplin’. It’s a telling instance of the unique hold that for some 25 years – from 1915 to 1940, say – the quaintly endearing personage of the Little Tramp, accident-prone and cheated of his due but doggedly hopeful, resourceful and resilient, exercised over the Western world’s imagination
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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