Category: Books
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Wordsworth and Billy Collins
William Wordsworth was born on April 7, 1770, reminds The Writer’s Almanac. He died on April 23, 1850. William Shakespeare (1564-1616) also died on April 23 —and that’s also believed to be his birthday. The philosopher Bertrand Russell summed up Wordsworth’s career this way: In his youth, Wordsworth sympathized with…
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The Glamour of Grammar
The Glamour of Grammar sounds like an oxymoron, but there is a link between the two words, says the author, Roy Peter Clark. He explains: The bridge between the words glamour and grammar is magic. According to the OED (Oxford English Dictionary), glamour evolved from grammar through an ancient association…
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The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis
The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis is a romp of an autobiographical novel with all the sex any young man could want. The hero, Keith Nearing, is an Englishman in his 50s looking back on an idyllic summer holiday in Italy when he turned 21 surrounded by permissive, pulchritudinous girls.
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The Shallows by Nicholas Carr
If you love to read, read The Shallows by Nicholas Carr. His views on what the internet is doing to our brains have been disputed by others. If you love the internet, you won’t like it when he argues the internet encourages cursory reading. We flit from one web page…
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Melvyn Bragg on Singlish
This may be my last post for about a month. I hope to be blogging again from the middle of November. So, before the hiatus, one last post about Singapore. Here is Melvyn Bragg writing about Singapore English. He is an eminent British journalist, who edited the recent issue of…
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The Lady and The Monk by Pico Iyer
The Lady and The Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto, by Pico Iyer, is one of the books I have most enjoyed reading this year. Pico Iyer writes beautifully and lovingly of Japan. It is, in fact, a love story. Published in 1992, it’s about a year he spent in Kyoto,…
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Poems Singapore
I saw this book and loved it at first sight. How could I not with its poems about Singapore? It is called Words: Poems Singapore and Beyond and edited by Edwin Thumboo. As luck would have it, the very first page I opened had a poem by him about the…
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World War II in books and films
Here’s September 1 one day late: September 1, 1939, written by WH Auden in New York when Germany invaded Poland, starting the Second World War. The war produced epic novels and movies. Casablanca was made in 1942, the year America joined the war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour.…
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Tony Blair on the appeal of George W Bush
People may not remember it, but George W Bush's approval ratings were well over 80 per cent when he declared war on Al Qaeda in Afghanistan in October 2001 following the September 11 tragedy. The ratings chart is from the BBC. Tony Blair cuts to the heart of Bush's appeal…
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Graham Greene: Major characters emerge; minor ones may be photographed
Greene, in fact, thought The Quiet American was superior to The End of the Affair. He said so in his autobiographical Ways of Escape.
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