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The Secret Life of Second-hand Books

The Secret Life of Second-hand Books

I was halfway through reading a novel published in 1913: cloth- covered, rust-spotted and printed on slightly spongy thick cream paper. Mightier than the Sword, a semi-autobiographical newspaper thriller, was written by a young Fleet Street journalist called Alphonse Courlander, who would die three years later in the muddy trenches of France. It isn’t great literature and I was struggling to stay engaged when, between pp.192 and 193, I found a folded piece of blue paper: a letter dated 1964, sent from a guest house in Ryde on the Isle of Wight.
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An Insatiable Appetite

An Insatiable Appetite

Here’s a book to relish, savour and devour. I would say digest, too, but for reasons which will soon become evident, that may be easier said than done. There is a lot – and I mean a lot – of eating and drinking to get through and, for today’s readers at least, the quantities alone, never mind the richness of the dishes consumed, and the gallons of wine, apéritifs and digestifs which accompany them, propel us into territory clearly marked ‘Completely Indigestible’. Happily, that is the very opposite of the book’s prose, which is light, delicious and verging on the addictive.
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A Story of Love Denied

A Story of Love Denied

During the dry, hot June of 2000 I found myself at an Edward Thomas study weekend at Madingley Hall in Cambridge engaged in an intemperate debate with a fellow who insisted on denigrating Thomas’s incoherence as a philosopher, which I felt was about as fair as criticizing Maradona’s abilities as a submarine captain. Keeping a lid on this increasingly silly exchange was the weekend’s leader, a softly spoken and impressively moustachioed poet and academic called Jem Poster. Jem was blessed with extraordinary patience and tact. He coaxed us down from our respective teetering ledges by diverting our attention towards the delicacy of Thomas’s natural imagery, a subject upon which my tormentor and I could only agree, so that in the end neither of us felt as though we had either won or lost.
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Telling it Straight

Telling it Straight

‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive . . .’ Well, it would be hard to argue it was a revolution, I suppose – that ‘new wave’ of English novels of my youth. But it was definitely thrilling to be reading new fiction in the late 1950s and early ’60s; and to be a young man buying those novels as soon as the booksellers would sell you them (if I remember rightly, once you were, or looked, 14) came pretty close to literary heaven. It wasn’t just the sex, though the authors of this new wave of literature seemed keen to treat the subject in as matter-of-fact a way as possible. It was also the settings, which were northern, provincial and predominantly working-class and were depicted as frankly as were the characters’ love affairs.
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A Kind of Psychosis

A Kind of Psychosis

We ended the twentieth century knowing less about the world than we did at the beginning. Physicists had robbed us of certainty. Newton and Faraday had lulled us into a false sense of security, then Schrödinger and Heisenberg pulled the cosmic rug from under our feet. In the twenty-first century how the cosmos is made and how it works have become impenetrable mysteries. Of course, the better- known disaster of the last century was murder on an industrial scale.
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