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I still can’t decide whether I’ve retired or just resigned, or am in fact redundant and unemployed. I’m undeniably jobless at 53, able-bodied (I hesitate to say ‘fit’), with a full head of hair and most of my teeth, and haunted by St Teresa of Avila’s dictum that more tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones. from London Review of Books https://ift.tt/2RCYgOh

The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 42 No. 18 (Friday 11 September 2020) from London Review of Books https://ift.tt/3koBZQY

Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 42 No. 18 (Friday 11 September 2020) from London Review of Books https://ift.tt/2EbqZXG

The realm of writing, for Nathalie Sarraute, remained the neutral, the anonym­ous, the impersonal, expressed as the pre­-conscious and pre-­personal undercurrents of the mind, which she named ‘tropisms.’ In 1956, she called tropisms the ‘living sub­stance of all my books’. from London Review of Books https://ift.tt/2DmCVW5

The​ Turkish language has a tense for gossip. Officially known as the reported past, it’s also the ‘hearsay’ tense, in which it’s possible to say things without its... from London Review of Books https://ift.tt/3lJepji

It is easy to overlook how loud pre­-modern education was. Most of our evidence for more than a thousand years of teaching consists of books, and, to the modern way of thinking, books are objects used silently. That this was not the usual way of doing things for much of Western history is now better known, though still difficult fully to understand. from London Review of Books https://ift.tt/2Gngm4I

The young Americans who heard something in Kraftwerk didn’t identify with the moneyed ease and ruffled shirtfronts of mainstream disco, or see any kind of career in old-school supper-club soul. In the era of Star Wars and click-addictive video games there had to be another way. from London Review of Books https://ift.tt/359SaNJ

It’s not often I hear news of her, though I know she’s a painter. I did read an interview she gave to Tatler five years ago. ‘I was engaged to somebody called Wynford Hicks,’ she said, ‘who was extraordinarily beautiful to look at but actually quite boring.’ She has obviously learned to think of her brief political involvement – and all that went with it – as a dreary interlude. from London Review of Books https://ift.tt/2YXxSmu

The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 42 No. 17 (Friday 28 August 2020) from London Review of Books https://ift.tt/3jCW7hD

Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 42 No. 17 (Friday 28 August 2020) from London Review of Books https://ift.tt/2QOUfpD

Ihadn’t​ been expecting to bump into Frank in one of the remoter stacks of the Cambridge University Library. This is where they keep the back numbers of old scholarly periodicals, a morgue... from London Review of Books https://ift.tt/31pn2WZ

My first reading of The Vanishing Half was greedy, fast, for plot, with the sun on my back and murder in the news. On my second, I noticed different things. Brit Bennett’s sentences don’t get in your way, and at first you don’t see that there are a few too many folksy bromides. from London Review of Books https://ift.tt/3ftrh8L

Hirokazu​ kore-eda’s film The Truth, released in France in January and now available online, feels like a respectable weepie, a mother and daughter story, except that it keeps being... from London Review of Books https://ift.tt/2DxgfSG

A map is a memory: it’s a representation, a re-presenting of something that has been. It may look good on paper – and that’s already a fiddle, a projection of a sphere onto a plane – but it’s always a botched job and mapmakers know it. from London Review of Books https://ift.tt/39VgGT1

see me what did u see did u scrape what I asked u for asked u to make me into asked &asked there is a name in the body of this blood-rush which u parse in-correctly, I know u think u connect... from London Review of Books https://ift.tt/2Dp1wcF

One afternoon I watched twenty minutes or so of esports car racing, fell asleep, and then wandered off to do something else. I came back a couple of hours later and turned the telly back on to see if the race had finished. That’s interesting, I thought, the graphics have improved – not exponentially, but enough to notice if you’re paying attention. Then I realised that I was now watching a replay of an actual car race. I managed to hit the off button before falling asleep again. from London Review of Books https://ift.tt/2Dp1v8B

The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 42 No. 16 (Friday 31 July 2020) from London Review of Books https://ift.tt/33Gc1mX

Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 42 No. 16 (Friday 31 July 2020) from London Review of Books https://ift.tt/3ibqco0

The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 42 No. 14 (Friday 03 July 2020) from London Review of Books https://ift.tt/38ObOyB

Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 42 No. 14 (Friday 03 July 2020) from London Review of Books https://ift.tt/2AEJmlU