The English have a gift for reference books: they suit our mundane genius. While the French built monuments, we compiled them: Encyclopaedia Britannica, the DNB and the OED, Grove’s dictionary, the Victoria County History. Before that, encyclopaedists and lexicographers were usually solitaries, eccentric antiquaries such as Camden, Aubrey and, most famously, Johnson, who produced his dictionary and Lives of the Poets largely unaided. Not surprisingly, Johnson was more or less mad.

Dec 2011

Critical Mass

He was Moral, but Was He Great?

But What Was It?

Critical Thinking

Austen’s Onion

War Made Him

Empires of the Mind

Sons of Scotland

A Child Of Nature

Less Is Moore

A Widower Writes

The Man and The Mask

Writer & Co

A Large Corpus

‘These Fragments I Have Shored Against my Ruins’

Remembrance of Paintings Past

Literary Lucubrations

It’s All Relative

Literary Legacies

Age Cannot Wither Us

The Outsider

The Birth of Sredni Vashtar

Out of the Fog

Classics Lite

Kierkegaard & Chocolate

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