Take a lucky dip in this refreshing pool of posts, randomly selected like literary Russian roulette (but more fun and much safer). Or filter by category to take a deeper dive into specific themes.  Enjoy!
Where life meets death
A surprising metaphor for the inexorable link between life and death, with the same sense of something encroaching with age. From the slim, touching and spare novel by Robert Seethaler.
And now for the news
A vivid image of a girl running to bring the latest news, like a French frigate sailing in.Â
Beguildy came panting after, apron flying, and loaded with news, like...
Ankle-snapping boulders
Another vivid image of this lunar landscape, boulders both too big and too small to step on, instead being the perfect size to catch and break your ankles as you...
High-perched asylum
In his acknowledgements, Leigh Fermor thanks a number of people for 'kindness and haven during restless literary displacements', and it seems he spent considerable time writing at their homes, or...
Book as mirror II
One of the most reassuring and surprising insights I found in reading Harold Bloom's literary criticism, was the realization that he wrote for a hidden audience of 'great readers' engaged...
Studying the ways of men
So that's the secret of the fox's cunning - they hide out of sight and study us! Thoreau has dozens of these tiny observations about animals.
See also Mervyn Peake's...
As simple as…
A simile that deserves to enter daily use. But was Newton’s thought simple? Yes and no…
‘… as simple as the thought of Newton…’
Source: Vasily Grossman, An Armenian Sketchbook,...
Miemie, black sheep, have you any wool?
This is an excellent sound for a sheep’s bleat. Add your own little vibrato and you too can sound like a Chinese lamb.
The character is also visually clever, combining the...
Mail at last
We forget, swamped as we are with constant connectivity, the past hunger for letters and news when travelling. I remember a few years in China and Taiwan, before the advent...
Red letter day
A red letter day is a holiday or a memorable day, something that might be marked on the calendar in red. For me it’s also a ‘red letter day’ when...
Appreciation is a better mode for the understanding of achievement than are all the analytical kinds of accounting for the emergence of exceptional individuals. Appreciation may judge, but always with gratitude, and frequently with awe and wonder. Â
By ‘appreciation’ I mean something more than ‘adequate esteem’. Need also enters into it, in the particular sense of turning to the genius of others in order to redress a lack in oneself, or finding in genius a stimulus to one’s own powers, whatever these may emerge as being.
Source: Harold Bloom, Genius (London: Fourth Estate, 2002), p. 5
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