It was the great French poet, essayist and aphorist Paul Valéry who wanted some relief from filling his journal every morning, rain or shine. Fed up, he wrote, “Having dedicated those hours to the life of the mind, I thereby earn the right to be stupid for the rest of the day.” Reading Jack Kohl’s…
Tag: books
Oxford Circus: ‘John Le Carré: Tradecraft’, Weston Library, Oxford
John Le Carré insisted that he was a writer first, and sometime spy second – and this excellent exhibition drawn from the author’s archive honours that self-image. It’s easy to emerge from the exit thinking Le Carré was half man, half words but – appropriately enough – the reality is not so simple. The entrance…
Our dictionaries are being sucked into a maw called the internet
We modern-day Luddites (I am 87) hate stooping to the web for dubious factoids, preferring to get our answers from well-edited books including our old dictionaries that were printed with ink on fine-fibre paper. Those books are now disappearing into a hungry maw called the internet.
ARTMUSELONDON 