Interview: Paul Durcan on poetry and art

JP O’Malley

Friday, 25th May 2012

Before we begin, Paul Durcan produces a piece of paper.

Just ten minutes previously, he felt a sudden urge, he says, to remember the last verse from W.H Auden’s ‘Fall of Rome’.

He raises the note, which he’s scribbled on with black biro, projecting each word with a careful steady cadence:

‘All together elsewhere, vast/ Herds of reindeer move across/ miles and miles of golden moss/ Silently and very fast.’

We’re here to talk about Durcan’s 22nd collection of poetry Praise In Which I Live and Move And Have...

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The art of fiction: George Orwell

David Blackburn

Friday, 25th May 2012

The Orwell Prize was awarded this week, which gives cause to consider Orwell himself. Biographer D.J. Taylor tries to delineate the myths that have arisen around Orwell in the film above, but can provide only an impression. Lack of evidence is, of course, a major problem. Orwell’s archive, though extensive, seems incomplete, and no recording of him survives, not even of his voice. He remains a tantalising figure.

The body of Orwell’s writing proves similarly...

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A writer’s vanity

Steven McGregor

Thursday, 24th May 2012

‘Jordan’s fourth biography, that’s vanity.  Only writers are subjected to this kind of inquisition about how their work reaches the viewer,’ quipped a panelist at a recent Birkbeck University event on self-publishing. Someone had mentioned the pejorative, ‘vanity press’ and the room of writers stirred. All were seated in neat rows in a wood paneled lecture hall off Russell Square. Appropriate given that Virginia Woolf, who once lived two blocks away, self-published.

Previously, this was known as private publishing. According to Alison Baverstock, another panelist and authority on self-publishing, the Bronte sisters, Willa Cather, Mark...

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Travelling tales

Emily Rhodes

Thursday, 24th May 2012

I happened to be with some family friends the other day. The daughter, just out of school, is soon to go travelling to various far-flung destinations and to this end she was busy assembling her backpack — a stage I remember all too well from my own first big trip.

Trying to fit everything you will need for the next six months inside something small enough to go on your back should be a liberating experience, but I found it alarming to say the least. As well as a scant assortment of clothes, I remember squeezing in...

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Shelf Life: Mary Killen

The Spectator

Wednesday, 23rd May 2012

The journalist and author Mary Killen is in the limelight this week. In addition to writing the Dear Mary column in the Spectator every week, she has written a self-help book about the loving Queen. How the Queen Can Make You Happy will be published on 1 June.

1) As a child, what did you read under the covers?

The William stories by Richmal Crompton and the The Passion Flower Hotel, which turned out to be secretly written not by a schoolgirl but by Roger Longrigg the father of...

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Allan Bloom: Prophet of Doom

Toby Young

Wednesday, 23rd May 2012

Allan Bloom’s famous book, The Closing of the American Mind, opens with the following sentence:

‘There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.’

In the twenty-five years that have passed since the book's publication, that belief has become, if anything, even more ubiquitous. It’s not simply true of American universities, it’s true of British universities as well. Indeed, this all-encompassing relativism — which Bloom says is regarded as ‘a moral postulate, the condition of a free...

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