‘Quite shortly the English pub will be extinct, part of history. The trouble is that the wretched brewers, in their hurry to find a modern equivalent of the traditional interior, neither stop to think nor to find proper architects and designers.’
Stephen Gardiner on the state of that bastion of so-called English cultural activity, the pub.
‘Like many nuns, she was a great talker; a chatterbox, she would have said. It was important, she had always told me, to keep cheerful in any adversity; the platitudes that sustained her had curiously little to do with any religion.’
Short Fiction by Hilary Mantel.
‘The market in femininity being such, how could one hope to see any male foragers? Only old and broken husbands were sometimes to be seen towed towards an Issa store advertising free-port prices.’
Fiction by Graham Greene.
‘The Beatles are good even though everyone knows they’re good, i.e. in spite of those claims of the Under Thirties about their filling a new sociological need like Civil Rights and LSD. Our need for them is neither sociological nor new, but artistic and old, specifically a renewal, a renewal of pleasure.’
Ned Rorem on The Beatles. Originally published in the February 1968 edition of The London Magazine.
‘Now I’m almost afraid of all the once-necessary artifices and obscurities, and can’t, for the life or the death of me, get any real liberation, any diffusion or dilution or anything, into the churning bulk of the words.’
A letter from Dylan Thomas to Vernon Watkins.
‘Having in recent years become saturated with criminal history, what strikes me most about that particular occasion is that all the principal guests were in one way or another involved with murderers.’
Essay by Rayner Heppenstall
‘They could easily have filled up at Mammoth Junction. He switched on the long beams, but even then the little cave of light moving ahead of them seemed no match for the dark battalions of surrounding pines.’
Fiction by Sylvia Plath.
‘The petition has been refused,’ he announced. ‘You may go.’
Fiction by Franz Kafka.
‘They passed away into the long eclipse,
Like voices on the wandering breezes blown
Now here – now gone – but whither, all unknown.’
Poetry from A. E. Housman.
‘Inscrutable, / Below shoulders not once / Seen by any man who kept his head, / You defy questions / You defy other godhood.’
Poetry by Sylvia Plath.
‘Kipling said somewhere that when you can do one thing really well, then do something else. Oscar Wilde said that only mediocrities develop. I just don’t know. I don’t think I want to change: just to become better at what I am.’
Ian Hamilton talks to Philip Larkin.
‘Elsie, who is a medium, clairvoyant and faith-healer, / Believes that my mother came to me / From the other side and used a spiritual force / To keep me warm.’
Poetry by W. G. Shepherd.
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