lililingling1985的专栏

One striking fact about English literature during the present century is the extent to which it has been dominated by foreigners — for example, Conrad, Henry James, Shaw, Joyce, Yeats, Pound and Eli

From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so w

James Burnhams book, The Managerial Revolution, made a considerable stir both in the United States and in this country at the time when it was published, and its main thesis has been so much discus

In Gullivers Travels humanity is attacked, or criticized, from at least three different angles, and the implied character of Gulliver himself necessarily changes somewhat in the process. In Part I

In many languages, it is said, there is no nonsense poetry, and there is not a great deal of it even in English. The bulk of it is in nursery rhymes and scraps of folk poetry, some of which may not

One thing that Marxist criticism has not succeeded in doing is to trace the connection between “tendency” and literary style. The subject-matter and imagery of a book can be explained in sociologica

IWhen Henry Millers novel, Tropic of Cancer, appeared in 1935, it was greeted with rather cautious praise, obviously conditioned in some cases by a fear of seeming to enjoy pornography. Amo

England Your EnglandIAs I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They ar

Tolstoys pamphlets are the least-known part of his work, and his attack on Shakespeare(1) is not even an easy document to get hold of, at any rate in an English translation. Perhaps, therefore, it

In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people — the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me. I was sub-divisional police officer of the

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilizati

As the advance into Germany continues and more and more of the devastation wrought by the Allied bombing planes is laid bare, there are three comments that almost every observer finds himself making.

Review of The Iron Heel by Jack London; The Sleeper Awakes by H. G. Wells; Brave New World by Aldous Huxley; The Secret of the League by Ernest Bramah.The reprinting of Jack Londons The Iron

1First of all the physical memories, the sounds, the smells and the surfaces of things.It is curious that more vividly than anything that came afterwards in the Spanish war I remember the

Somewhere or other Byron makes use of the French word longeur, and remarks in passing that though in England we happen not to have the word, we have the thing in considerable profusion. In the same

I said at the beginning of my first talk that this is not a critical age. It is an age of partisanship and not of detachment, an age in which it is especially difficult to see literary merit in a bo

TRIBUNENovember 8, 1946Someone has just sent me a copy of an American fashion magazine which shall be nameless. It consists of 325 large quarto pages, of which no fewer than 15 are given up

 TRIBUNEAugust 4, 1944Apropos of saturation bombing, a correspondent who disagreed with me very strongly added that he was by no means a pacifist. He recognized, he said, that ‘the Hun had

TRIBUNEDecember 24, 1943Attacking me in the Weekly Review for attacking Douglas Reed, Mr. A. K. Chesterton remarks, ‘‘My country — right or wrong’ is a maxim which apparently has no place in

Many recent statements in the press have declared that it is almost, if not quite, impossible for us to mine as much coal as we need for home and export purposes, because of the impossibility of ind

Contrary to popular belief, the past was not more eventful than the present. If seems so it is because when you look backward things that happened years apart are telescoped together, and because ve

As the corpse went past the flies left the restaurant table in a cloud and rushed after it, but they came back a few minutes later.The little crowd of mourners-all men and boys, no women — threade

Whenever I read phrases like ‘war guilt trials’, ‘punishment of war criminals’ and so forth, there comes back into my mind the memory of something I saw in a prisoner-of-war camp in South Germany, e

A Socialist today is in the position of a doctor treating an all but hopeless case. As a doctor, it is his duty to keep the patient alive, and therefore to assume that the patient has at least a cha

In the shadow of the atomic bomb it is not easy to talk confidently about progress. However, if it can be assumed that we are not going to be blown to pieces in about ten years time, there are many r

The reappearance of Helens Babies, in its day one of the most popular books in the world — within the British Empire alone it was pirated by twenty different publishing firms, the author receiving

Not long ago a publisher commissioned me to write an introduction for a reprint of a novel by Leonard Merrick. This publishing house, it appears, is going to reissue a long series of minor and partl

Realism, a much abused word, has at least four current meanings, but when applied to novels it normally means photographic imitation of everyday life. A ‘realistic’ novel is one in which the dialo

You never walk far through any poor quarter in any big town without coming upon a small newsagents shop. The general appearance of these shops is always very much the same: a few posters for the Da

As you travel northward your eye, accustomed to the South or East, does not notice much difference until you are beyond Birmingham. In Coventry you might as well be in Finsbury Park, and the Bull Ri

IDickens is one of those writers who are well worth stealing. Even the burial of his body in Westminster Abbey was a species of theft, if you come to think of it.When Chesterton wrote his

About a year ago I and a number of others were engaged in broadcasting literary programmes to India, and among other things we broadcast a good deal of verse by contemporary and near-contemporary En

 TRIBUNEJune 2, 1944An extract from the Italian radio, about the middle of 1942, describing life in London:Five shillings were given for one egg yesterday, and one pound sterling for a

The position of the writer in an age of State control is a subject that has already been fairly largely discussed, although most of the evidence that might be relevant is not yet available. In this

Some years ago a friend took me to the little Berkshire church of which the celebrated Vicar of Bray was once the incumbent. (Actually it is a few miles from Bray, but perhaps at that time the two l

Last week I pointed out that art and propaganda are never quite separable, and that what are supposed to be purely aes-thetic judgements are always corrupted to some extent by moral or political or

Since Charles Reades books are published in cheap editions one can assume that he still has his following, but it is unusual to meet anyone who has voluntarily read him. In most people his name see

About a year ago I attended a meeting of the P.E.N. Club, the occasion being the tercentenary of Miltons Aeropagitica — a pamphlet, it may be remembered, in defense of freedom of the press. Milton

ISoon after I arrived at St Cyprians (not immediately, but after a week or two, just when I seemed to be settling into the routine of school life) I began wetting my bed. I was now aged eig

Our civilization, pace Chesterton, is founded on coal, more completely than one realizes until one stops to think about it. The machines that keep us alive, and the machines that make machines, are