Slang-dotted prose
A lively description of Simon Winder's zestful style which demonstrates that prose needn't be plodding just because it's about a...
Something more pressing
Yes, you can find a thousand things more urgent than writing, or at least more insistent. Writing for this...
How hard one must work … and how!
In recent weeks, while typing up scores of quotations from Thoreau on the nature of writing, I started reading some...
How to write a paper
Heaney’s introduction to his translation of Beowulf praises Tolkien’s ‘epoch-making paper’, a lecture delivered in 1936 entitled ‘Beowulf: The Monsters...
Of words, wording and eternity
Part of my blogophyte journey has been to learn about some of the technical workings of the online world, among...
Quill-driving alien
A foreign writer? A spy reporting on his hosts? A literary martian? I liked this unusual triologism of George Eliot's. ...
In praise of idiosyncratic spelling
Those were the days, when you spelled, or spelt, or spellt, a word as you saw fit. Then the spelling...
This I do not know
One of the best books I read last year is The Russian Journal of John Steinbeck. He spent a month...
Learning to write
How do you learn to write? My belief is that if fine writing comes from you, mostly it is due to...
‘Write,’ he said
A fine parting injunction to a friend you are seeing off at the train station. Julián did as he was...
Missing homework
Here Steinbeck suffers a bout of exam nerves before being bombarded with highly intellectual questions from his counterparts in the...
Chain of consequences
Grossman's novel deals with a man who returns to 'normal' life after 30 years in the gulag. Here he shows...
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