Here is a list of new publications that interest me. So far the list consists entirely of books reviewed or advertised in the London Review of Books: Edmund de Waal: The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance Matthew Crawford: The Case for Working with your Hands Sarah Bakewell: A [Read more…]
Good afternoon everybody. I am very pleased to have been invited by Sekai O Miru Kai to talk to you about the twentieth century British novelist E. M. Forster. I want to emphasize straightaway that I am not at all an “E. M. Forster expert” but just somebody who enjoys reading his novels and essays, which I first came across when I was 16 or 17 and studying “A level” English Literature at a college in Tonbridge, the same town in Kent where E. M. Forster was sent to a small boarding school consisting of just 30 boys. But, sensitive and homesick, Forster didn’t really fit in and had a miserable time being bullied and humiliated by the other boys.
Walter Kaufmann is an excellent teacher. In Goethe, Kant, and Hegel: Discovering the Mind, vol 1 he lays out clearly the way in which Goethe advanced our understanding of the mind and how Kant, despite his “making a clean sweep of so many fruitless speculations” (p. 5), impeded it, and [Read more…]
The malice of the forces of darkness and the arrival of four books and the latest LRB have caused The Liberation of Jerusalem to be temporarily postponed… Firstly, Doubt’s Boundless Sea, Skepticism & Faith in the Renaissance, by Don Cameron Allen, arrived early last week. I ordered this book because [Read more…]
In the fourth Canto of The Liberation of Jerusalem, the seductive Syrian sorceress Armida is sent to charm the Christians and succeeds in leading a number of frail knights astray. ne nos inducas in tentationem sed libera nos a malo But where is the Christian knight of our company who [Read more…]
I am reading my way through Max Wickert‘s powerful modern verse translation of Tasso’s La Gerusalemme Liberata, a translation that is faithful to the original and at the same time immensely readable. The dynamic opening stanza of the The Liberation of Jerusalem, its fidelity to the original combined with its [Read more…]
In the last fifty or sixty years a great erosion of our English language heritage has taken place and at the heart of this loss lies the attempt to render the Holy Bible as well as church liturgies and hymns in a form of English that is supposedly modern and easier for ordinary people to understand.
I finished reading M. A. Screech‘s Montaigne And Melancholy a couple of weeks ago now. Among the many interesting passages there is one in which Screech discusses s treatment of Julian the Apostate. Montaigne, the orthodox Catholic, “never blackened a man he did not agree with.” In the case of [Read more…]
Goethe, writing from Frascati in 1787: All in all, associating with more and more people agrees with me. I observe their various temperaments and the way each behaves. This one acts his part, that one does not; this one will make his way easily, that one with great difficulty: this [Read more…]
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