Diana Athill
Stick to the Script
The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting, and Why it Still Matters
By Philip Hensher
Macmillan 274pp £14.99 order from our bookshop
We don’t have to look far to see how rare it is, nowadays, for people to communicate by putting pen to paper. It is not only those born into the computer age who don’t think of doing it. Even very old people, including me, have friends whose handwriting they have never seen. We all communicate, of course (tweet tweet tweet, and yack yack yack on the mobile), but not by pen and ink. Does it matter?
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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.