Hilary Mantel and the curation of memory
- Added On: September 26th, 2022
- By: Tam McDonald
- Comments: No Comments
Thinking between the lines of the deservedly respectful obituaries for Hilary Mantel, who died last week, a swelling impression is that she was not so much a writer of historical fiction as she was a curator and philosopher of memory. While librarians and booksellers would be happy for a descriptor that made their filing jobs … Read More
First Folio Frenzy Builds
- Added On: August 15th, 2022
- By: Tam McDonald
- Comments: No Comments
Shakespeare’s World is beginning to vibrate in anticipation of next year’s 400th anniversary on 8 November of the publication of the First Folio of the playwright’s (almost) Complete Works. In addition to the marking of the date itself, celebrating the appearance of one of the most consequential and famous books ever produced, the preparations for … Read More
Metaverse on MetaMars
- Added On: April 25th, 2022
- By: Tam McDonald
- Comments: No Comments
When Winston Churchill was speaking, in 1939, about Russia as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma”, he was at least talking about a real place. His purpose was to acknowledge the reality of the country as being equally menacing and inscrutable and, eight decades later, those adjectives have lost none of their … Read More
How do we define the “language of lawlessness”?
- Added On: March 14th, 2022
- By: Tam McDonald
- Comments: No Comments
After three dozen blogposts, we have some measure of the moral ambivalence with which the global spread of the English language has been greeted. If it weren’t for the piratical energies of the early naval “explorers” and the subsequent depredations of a ravenously expanding Empire, the summary of an earlier posting (October 2020) might have … Read More
Fleet Street defined the Public Realm
- Added On: January 9th, 2022
- By: Tam McDonald
- Comments: No Comments
It didn’t take Covid to get city-dwellers thinking about what attracted them to their city centres, and concluding that maybe home wasn’t so bad after all. The history of the last century, along with advances in communication technology over that same period, have made it ever easier for the world to be brought to the … Read More