Category: Book reviews
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Recent reviewing
“Throughout bandit country, Patterson notates what the blurb describes as a ‘hybrid dialect of Newry-streets and Scots and Irish-inflected English’. For most readers the dialect will be the first thing they notice. For many it will represent a barrier to entry, but it is the kind of barrier I am grateful for. It makes you…
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Tweeting Ourselves to Death
I was once part of a large, discussion-based event for secondary school students, where the organisers (I was one of them) tasked the participants with discussing whether social media was bad or good for the world. The arguments they came up with were, as you might expect, varied and nuanced, and, when they drafted them,…
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T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form
Review: T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form, Anthony Julius, 1995 The great strength of Anthony Julius’s study of T. S. Eliot’s literary Jew-baiting is also, in a way, its weakness. Julius does not linger on the poet’s motivations, his influences, his reception or even his later work but instead focuses, almost to the point…
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The Memory Police
Like all ordinary people I worry I don’t a thorough enough record of the books I read. I do not know when I started having these compulsions: I have not always been like this and the truth is the worry is never motivating enough to sustain any commitment to one method. Instead, every now and…
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Some books in brief
One of the first reviews I ever wrote was of a pamphlet of poems by Jonathan Davidson, called ‘Humfrey Coningsby’. In a turn of events I will not explain but which involves Twitter and Jonathan’s new collection of his and other people’s poems, A Commonplace, I discovered the website the review had originally been published…
jeremywikeley.com 