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Essays
A writer who upholds ‘human decency’
Patricia Crai
Jamaica Kincaid Putting Myself Together Writing 1974-336pp. Picador. £20. Born in Antigua in 1949, Jamaica Kincaid spent her first years in the United States as a teenage servant (her word, “au pairs”
“A deluge of printed matter pours over the world”, F. R. Leavis proclaimed in his doctoral thesis of 1924. An excess of low-quality verbiage, in the view of this young literary scholar, was doing harm
My fresher’s year at Edinburgh University offered a few rude awakenings. The first: learning the university had run out of self-catered accommodation. The next was that the uni’s solution was to have
“Where are we to begin?”, Virginia Woolf asks in her essay “How to Read a Book”. “How are we to bring order into this multitudinous chaos and so get the deepest and widest pleasures from what we read?
The acclaimed American author and literary critic talks to Zoe West
“As movers and the moved both know”, John Updike noted, “books are heavy freight ... They make us think twice about changing addresses.” Books: A manifesto, or, How to build a library begins with the