My Christmas Presents

Well, I did rather well for presents this  Christmas. This is hardly the place to mention the ice-cream making machine, with which I have already created both a refreshing rosewater sorbet and a sick-makingly rich peach ice cream; but a couple of my other presents are more relevant to the concerns of this blog.
I was [...]

Thirty-Nine Steps on TV

Last night’s film of The Thirty-Nine Steps was a pleasant enough way of spending a relaxed post-Christmas evening, but it was a long way from Buchan. It followed the basic pattern of the novel – Scudder killed in Hannay’s flat; Hannay on the run from both police and enemy agents – but the adaptors clearly [...]

O’Casey’s “The Silver Tassie”

I’m surprised by how much the Times critic (Charles Morgan?) liked Sean O’Casey’s The Silver Tassie. He thought the expressionist second act  “a brilliant failure that might have been at the core of a masterpiece.” He praised the play’s use of poetry, and its ambition, and its moments of “transcendental dialogue”.  He applauded O’Casey’s experimental [...]

Empson’s “Newly Discovered War Poems”

In the huge Complete Poems of William Empson (The collection isn’t huge, but the notes are of Ricksian proportions) there is a squib from 1928, called Newly Discovered War Poems.
It goes like this:
The sappers dug through Archie yesterday.
There he was buried slap in the way of the mine.
And – Oh my God!
Scrunch.
Trickle, trickle, trickle.
Archie used [...]

David Jones on Radio 3.

A talk by Michael Symmons Roberts about David Jones (author of the extraordinary In Parenthesis and other works) was on Radio 3 last night. The podcast will be available on the BBC website for the next week or so.