Riddley Walker (book review)
This book is hard to read. The language insists on calling attention to itself, so no stars for “ease” or “comfort”. But I can’t imagine a more effective way of insisting on the fragility,...
Author: nannyrhops
The Master Gardener’s Journal
If you keep a journal, you probably have your reasons, whether you consider yourself a writer or not. It is often said that such writing can be therapeutic, even transformational. The recent film Master Gardener provides a...
The Wonderful Power of Writing
In addition to being a marketable skill on LinkedIn, writing is — or was — an awe-inspiring technology, representing a power to make language go beyond one person’s limits in terms of time, space...
A Brand of Writing
A couple of months ago I attended a two-day Masterclass in Food Writing at the British Library (for me, always an awe-inspiring institution). Designed and taught by the food writer Mallika Basu, the class...
Absence of Mind: Book Review
Marilynne Robinson, Absence of Mind, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010. If you’re reading Robinson’s essays, you probably have already read her novels. You may well approach the essays as I did,...
Bateson’s Vision of Unity: Review of Biography
Gregory Bateson: The Legacy of a Scientist. A biography by David Lipset, Boston: Beacon Press, 1982. Gregory Bateson must surely have presented a daunting prospect to his biographer. Lipset takes us on an epic...