What are you reading now?

[Don Basilio]

Colm Toibin The Master - novel about Henry James. I've read all his novels in the last year. This is the odd one out, being neither about Enniscorthy (the novelist's home town) nor about AIDS.

It is tempting me to re-read some more James.

[french frank]

Colm Toibin The Master - novel about Henry James. I've read all his novels in the last year. This is the odd one out, being neither about Enniscorthy (the novelist's home town) nor about AIDS.

It is tempting me to re-read some more James.

A novel about Henry James - now there's novel ...

[Pianorak]

Just starting another vinteuil recommendation: They Winter Abroad by T.H. White. - Looks promising!

[gradus]

I ploughed through the Rebecca West book a year or two ago and you seem to be enjoying it more than I did. What struck me was her extraordinary grasp of the history of the places visited and these were the passages that kept me returning to the book - it must have taken me well over a year to read and her many more to write but I think I have only returned to it for a specific reference to Croatia. I suppose I admire the book rather than like it.
I am trying to find and would be interested in any recommendations that other may make for books on the Ottoman Empire. I have been trying to get hold of Sir Charles Eliot's Turkey in Europe on the strength of Rebecca West's praise for it, but it seems hard to find and too expensive when I do locate it.

[french frank]

I have been trying to get hold of Sir Charles Eliot's Turkey in Europe on the strength of Rebecca West's praise for it, but it seems hard to find and too expensive when I do locate it.

A copy here for just over £14 ... I think that includes postage. [No, postage $3.99 extra, from the US ]

[Sydney Grew]

And three copies HERE gratis and instanter (which is as it and indeed everything else should in the ideal world to come be).

[gradus]

ff and Sydney, many thanks for your kind help.

[JimD]

(which is as it and indeed everything else should in the ideal world to come be).

Ugh.

Throughout this section it must be borne in mind that in
all questions of right and wrong inversion the final appeal is
not to history, but to the reader's perception: what sounds
right to most modern ears is right for modern purposes.

HW and FG Fowler The King's English (1930) p.190


The converse is probably also true. Not the same linguistic issue, but probably relevant.

[Sydney Grew]

Fowler - the Ebenezer Prout of modern discourse what! (He - Prout not Fowler - wrote four symphonies by the way.)

Present reading is Smear! - Wilson and the Secret State, by Dorril and Ramsay. An excellent book to dip into in restaurants while awaiting the attendances of tattooed waitresses. (Would Fowler have insisted that they are "waiters"?)

[vinteuil]

I wonder - do organ students - Bach students - still sing out to the G minor fugue those immortal words : -

"O Ebenezer Prout -
You really are a lout... "

And do students of the WTC (or the 'jolly old 48', as Esmé Muchgoddery prefers) sing along to the Prout ditties? -

www2.rhul.ac.uk/~uhwm006/prout.html

[Don Basilio]

Just started re-reading Barnaby Rudge.

[Don Basilio]

Colm Toibin The Master - novel about Henry James. I've read all his novels in the last year. This is the odd one out, being neither about Enniscorthy (the novelist's home town) nor about AIDS.

Mr Grew may well be interested that there is vignette of the great lady novelist, Rhoda Broughton, who at one point visits James.

I read Miss Broughton's Dear Faustina this spring on Mr Grew's recommendation, and was intelligently entertained.

[Sydney Grew]

Colm Toibin The Master - novel about Henry James. I've read all his novels in the last year. This is the odd one out, being neither about Enniscorthy (the novelist's home town) nor about AIDS. . . .

Thought for a moment you meant all James's novels - although reading all those in a year too is not exactly impossible. Have you seen his very last? Entitled "The Outcry" it is a light comedy full of slang and has for some reason received very little critical attention.

You might enjoy though, if you do not already know, a rather good novel by a great chum of James, Howard Sturgis's Belchamber. It is about a sensitive young fellow who prefers doing wool-work indoors to playing Red Indians in the shrubbery.

Was there not something ultimately jumped-up about James? Would Fowler have approved his style? And what about his brother, did he do good?

[french frank]

When I was about eight I remember a book we had in the house called Walter's Feats, and for some reason the memory came back to me last night when I was thinking about the children's books I once read. I don't remember the story, only the picture on the cover and the dusty smell of a book that had been stored somewhere for a long time: and lo!



And it could be mine

[french frank]

Pah! Out to lunch and am now reading a book forced on me by a friend: The Strange Death of David Kelly, by Norman Baker. And it's no good: I shan't be convinced he was murdered because, however fishy it looks, however many ends were left loose, however much one would wish ACL Blair to be personally responsible - that isn't proof .