The Book of Derek Parfit
Walk around Oxford on any reasonably warm and relatively sunny day and, as you inevitably reach the Radcliffe Camera, you will invariably witness a perennial phenomenon: along a high, practically unclimbable and unassailable, Headington-stone-yellow and castle-worthy wall, there will be an impressive line-up of young people sitting down restfully, or leaning languidly against that Corallian...
Read in order to live
IT SEEMS THAT PEOPLE WHO SHOULD be experts on the subject of reading and of writing, perhaps also on the subject of children and the books that could open their minds, fashion their lives, vitally define their future, are of many minds as regards that very special unicorn of a genre, children’s books: For C.S....
Literary lingo
While serving in World War II, Joseph Heller concluded that war was a farce in which only those crazy enough to fight were considered sane enough to do so. That became the theme of a novel he wrote several years later. Heller titled his novel Catch-18. Just as this book was about to be published...
The Cornhill Magazine and Framley Parsonage
Soon after my return from the West Indies1 I was enabled to change my district in Ireland for one in England. For some time past my official work had been of a special nature, taking me out of my own district; but through all that, Dublin had been my home, and there my wife and children...
Unmentioned in dispatches
Some of them never come home to fanfares, they dump their kitbags down at the door, kiss their wives and let their children wrestle them down to the kitchen floor, switch the telly on, pour out a whiskey, search for the local football score. Some of them skip the quayside welcome, dodge the bunting and...
Understanding the unseen
History, according to the heartfelt judgement of a young scholar in Alan Bennett’s marvellous play The History Boys “[is] just one fuckin’ thing after another.” Biology is a bit like this, because evolution works with a single set of raw materials within the constraints imposed by the planet’s environmental conditions. Every cell is surrounded by...
Animal scruples
Two poems from La Fontaine’s Selected Fables, relating that the natures of two-legged and four-legged creatures have a great deal in common. From a delightful new translation with an introduction and explanatory notes by Christopher Betts published by Oxford University Press, and illustrated throughout with Gustave Doré’s exquisite original engravings. The rat and the...
