March 2015

Meeting the English

Educated at Edinburgh and Oxford, Kate Clanchy (http://literature.britishcouncil.org/kate-clanchy) lived in London’s East End for several years, before moving to Oxfordshire where she now works as a teacher, journalist and freelance writer. Her 2013 novel has a summary as follows. It’s in response to an advertisement that Struan Robertson, a bright orphan, and just seventeen, leaves his dour native […]

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The Soul of the Marionette by John Gray

John Gray (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gray_(philosopher)) has been entertaining us now for years with his trenchant attacks on humanism, global capitalism, campaigning atheism, progress (historical and ethical), The Enlightenment, and any other (as he sees it) variety of flaccid optimism. He has presented these in False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism (1998), Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans

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Glass

Glass is the first novel of London based writer Alex Christofi (http://alexchristofi.com/) The outline is as follows. Günter Glass, ex-milkman and aspiring window-cleaner, is certainly pure. And he’s pretty transparent. But the jury’s still out on how sharp he is. What naïve young Günter does have is a head for heights and, ever since he

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The Anchoress

It was only the other night that I was luxuriating in the sounds of the Symphonia armoniae celestium revelationum (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Symphoniae-Spiritual-Songs-Hildegard-Bingen/dp/B000026NDI/ref=tag_dpp_lp_edpp_ttl_in) by Hildegard of Bingen. Hildegard was in the charts in the 50s. The 1150s, that is. It occured to me that her monophonic compostions would be the ideal background for a recent publication by Robyn Cadwallader (http://robyncadwallader.com/) – ‘The Anchoress’.

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Dancing in the Dark by Karl Ove Knausgaard

It takes some chutzpah to publish an autobiographical novel in 6 parts over 3,500 pages with the title ‘Min Kamp’ (Norwegian for ‘My Struggle’) with the obvious resonance of a darker figure from twentieth century history. Yet that is exactly what Karl Ove Knausgaard (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Ove_Knausg%C3%A5rd) has done. In this 4th instalment – Dancing in the Dark – Knausgaard

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