When Mr Ardle visited on Sunday he brought with him a spare, slightly damaged, Penguin paperback copy of Hunger by Knut Hamsun and swapped it for a prinstine Folio Society copy of a selection of Holinshed’s Chronicles. He had received the damaged goods from The Book Depository and they sent [Read more…]
We require but two photographs to describe this afternoon’s tabletop sport, for the King’s arrows were sharp in the heart of his enemies who were attempting to besiege him. The besiegers, the Green Dragons, had erected a watch tower to guard the approach to the Castle of the King of [Read more…]
Hiroshima ekiden? What’s that? Until relatively recently I never really “got” what the attraction was of spending your day watching a load of runners running in a marathon or a long distance relay (ekiden). That sort of thing is very popular here in Nippon and I was set to ignore [Read more…]
This is a comparative review of Warrior Politics, by Robert Kaplan, and Straw Dogs, by John Gray, which I wrote in 2003. The website it originally appeared on is long gone, so I am republishing it here…
John Gray is one of several contemporary writers who look back to classical antiquity for inspiration. In his book, Straw Dogs, several of Gray’s references to ancient Greece reminded me of similar choices made by Robert D. Kaplan in Warrior Politics and so I thought it would be interesting to compare the two books even though they discuss quite different subjects.
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This is an essay about the British novelist J. G. Ballard (1930-2009), which I wrote in York, back in 1988. Looking over the essay now, I notice not only the influence of the Marxist school of literary criticism, which for me had commenced with Raymond Williams and culminated in a reading of Terry Eagleton‘s The Function of Criticism (1984), but also the ingrained Jacobean biblical sensibility that I regard as every Briton’s birthright, across which the sensibility of Chinese philosophy casts a glancing light. The concrete island onto which Maitland crashes is the objective-corellative of his psyche – of the isolation of the human spirit, the alienation inherent in bourgeois society. “I am the island,” he cries at the end of the ninth chapter, confirming that the need to explore and identify this terrain is as important as the apparant need to escape from it… Continue DH |
 J. G. Ballard |
J’ai résumé L’Étranger, il y a longtemps, par une phrase dont je reconnais qu’elle est très paradoxale : ‘Dans notre sociéte tout homme qui ne pleure pas à l’enterrement de sa mère risque d’être condamné à mort.’ Je voulais dire seulement que le héros du livre est condamné parce qu’il [Read more…]
This is the state of play after several hours of idle chat that took us on a ramble through several centuries of European literature, with a nod to the Confucian Analects and a bottle of Montepulciano D’Abruzzo from the Casale Vecchio, which is to say, being translated, an antique fort, [Read more…]
I took Eileen-chan along to a nearby elementary school for the tondo matsuri on Sunday morning. We got there too late for the drumming and didn’t stay for the pounded rice cakes, but we did enjoy watching the fiery destruction of all the New Year’s decorations, wreaths and calligraphy papers, [Read more…]
In chess, Ablenkung is the art of luring your opponent into removing a piece from an advantageous position so as to give yourself access to a file, row or area of the board of vital concern to the outcome of your game. What is the best way of doing that? [Read more…]
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