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Friday, 13 September 2019

Rose Tremain's The Colour: less than the sum of its - many - parts

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I’ve just finished reading a novel which I didn’t much enjoy, but which I forced myself to finish because I wanted to leave a review of it o...
Sunday, 1 September 2019

You do realise, of course, that reading this blog marks you out as — well, how do I put this without being too effusive? — a little more refined, a cut above the rabble and someone whose intellect and lively mind one can only admire. Elite? Yes, and then some

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Over the years like many, many people the world over, I had bought ‘the Sunday papers’. Being — apparently — less intellectually and politic...
Saturday, 10 August 2019

Bugger Hemingway and his phoney machismo - the football season has started! Rejoice.

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To Bodmin last night with sister-in-law and brother-in-law Julie and Denis and Denis’s friend Leo to the folk club. Folk really isn’t my thi...
Monday, 29 July 2019

Longwinded? Dull? Are we really talking about the acme of new journalism? Yes, sadly we are - ain’t nothing as impressionable as impressionable folk. On the other hand: RIP Jim Innes

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I have made no secret of the fact that growing up, with a very bright older brother who seemed to be able to master whatever he turned his h...
Sunday, 28 July 2019

More reading, finishing off one and starting a promising new one (Kierkegaard, Hollywood And How He Married An Alien From Mars or something - I’ll check and get back to you)

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I’ve started another, more private, blog which is more in the way of an ordinary diary (and thus probably quite boring), and this is the lat...
Thursday, 25 July 2019

In which I confess to an ongoing bout of ‘out of sortism’ (and wonder whether Boris Johnson will come crashing down this week or next)

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Since losing the puzzles (which I think I mentioned) and being aware that my annual income has plummeted by pretty much a third, I’ve been f...
Tuesday, 16 July 2019

Give and take? It’s has to be a two-way street. Always. And as for gentle summer evenings . . . a boy, even one batting 70, can still dream

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This is also going in my main blog: I wrote this piece in a fit of irritation going on anger a week or two ago. If you read it, you will u...
Sunday, 14 July 2019

Ain’t nothing going to do it except doing it. So why am I still pfaffing around?

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OK, I know exactly what I should be doing but I’m not doing it. It’s not rocket science. There is not great shakes about it: I should be get...
Friday, 12 July 2019

Sorry about this, but — completely unplanned — I began jotting down a few comments and being the sort who really can’t shut up . . .

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Oh, what have I let myself in for? Just read the introduction to a book of five essays on Hemingway’s ‘first’ novel (it was his second, in f...
Monday, 8 July 2019

Another damned thick, square book! Always, scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr Wolfe?

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Well, as I’m serious about getting this Hemingway bollocks completed, and as I want to prove to myself that the reading this, that and t’oth...