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Cluster index: Alan Wall

from White Ivory, chapters 9 & 10

< chapters 7 & 8  A Fortnightly Serial By ALAN WALL. • Chapter 9 Over the Rainbow   ILL HADN’T BEEN able to get away on the Friday. He’d had to go in for some tutorial sessions. Finally he had made his exit. As he walked along the corridor he saw the unmistakable figure of […]

from White Ivory, chapters 7 & 8

< chapters 5 & 6    chapters 9 & 10 > A Fortnightly Serial By ALAN WALL. • Chapter Seven Readings he first thing Will did when he got back home was to take his one remaining copy of Kicking Away the Ladder from the shelf. He stood by the window and turned it over […]

from White Ivory, chapters 5 & 6

< chapters 3 & 4        chapters 7 & 8 > A Fortnightly Serial By ALAN WALL. • Chapter Five Will’s Lecture E HAD FASTENED up on the wall, as usual, his reproduction of Francis Bacon’s painting of Miss Muriel Belcher. And alongside it his Head VI of 1948, one of those human mouths […]

from White Ivory, chapters 3 & 4

< chapters 1 & 2     chapters 5 & 6 > A Fortnightly Serial.   By ALAN WALL. • Chapter Three The Blues Y THE TIME Will’s train was half way to London the following morning, his son Charlie was entering his supervisor’s room in a large concrete block. She had the typescript of the […]

from White Ivory, chapters 1 & 2

chapters 3 & 4 > A Fortnightly Serial. By ALAN WALL. • Chapter One. Attraction WO CARS ARE moving towards each other on a winter night. It is a country road and there is no roadside illumination. Only the carlights. These beams swerve and shudder and prod the tarmac, the grass, the trees. Occasionally they […]

Charlie Boy and Captain Fitz.

A One-Act Play. By ALAN WALL. ♦ Cast Charles Darwin Robert Fitzroy Primate Skull Samuel Wilberforce Thomas Henry Huxley Guide Visitor ♦ The scene is Down House in Kent. Charles Darwin’s study. There is a miscellany of books papers, prints, insects, slides, rocks, samples, a microscope, tweezers and magnifying glasses, as there was in his […]

‘King of infinite space’.

The Virtue of Uncertainty. By ALAN WALL. ◊ t is a curious fact, a vivid historical coincidence, that the great French scientist Laplace was formulating his notions at precisely the same moment that John Keats was writing his letters about Shakespeare. Laplace was an eloquent spokesman for classical causality: we can summarise this crudely by […]

Kubrick: Sex in the cinema.

A Fortnightly Film Commentary. By Alan Wall. he nude on the canvas isn’t entirely naked: at least it is covered in paint. Not so the nude on celluloid. Film is thinner than canvas. You can see through it. With celluloid, they shine the lights right through your body and out the other side. How does […]

The Lad from Stratford.

A Fortnightly Review. ◊ Elizabeth Winkler Shakespeare Was a Woman and other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature Simon and Schuster 2023 | £13.77 $19.38. • By ALAN WALL. ll that follows is by way of deeply troubled reflections. I do not have any fixed opinions on the authorship question. The […]

AI

Signs of the Times By Alan Wall. e couldn’t have had the Renaissance nowadays. Too many books involved. A fire hazard. Health and Safety would not have stood for it. If it’s not online, it can’t be relevant anyway. The accessibility of knowledge is the proof of its utility. If it’s not mainline, then it’s […]

The world we live in.

Alan Wall: ‘he Plague is no longer a historical item, safely bracketed away with things that no longer happen. All those buboes. It is back on our streets, in our homes, in our lungs.’

Each lexicon a labyrinth.

Alan Wall: ‘We have steamrolled our modern orthography and conventions on to the Shakespeare text. We should always try to get back to the original language of Shakespeare: it can be a revelation.’

Birthing the Minotaur.

Alan Wall: ‘The price of civilization is our emotional crippledom. You want the Taj Mahal, Michaelangelo, aeroplanes? Then go buy yourself a mental walking-stick.’

Of Entropy and Knees.

Alan Wall: ‘Dyer has noticed that he’s started to get on a bit, and he’s noticed that a lot of other people have too. So he has become interested, not only in the question of his knackered knees, but also in the question of late style. So, what is it, exactly?’

The tramp’s companion.

Alan Wall: ‘The essayistic mind-set has an open aperture at both ends. It does not close itself off with conclusions. It remains provisional, in order to dance on the page.’