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Index: Biography, Memoir and Autobiographical Prose

Seeing with Words.

Wednesday, 25 November 2020

Hoyt Rogers: ‘In Bonnefoy’s estimation, the deserted landscape, in which a few scattered human beings merely throw the solitude into deeper relief, is one of the major inventions of the Seicento, championed by Poussin and his followers such as Dughet.’

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The Good Writer Hašek.

Monday, 23 November 2020

Stephen Wade: ‘Hašek shows a world of rigid maintenance of all the power structures which make and sustain the social world of the Empire, but he shows it from the bottom. If we look at such a rigid world of apparent moral enforcement and social hierarchy from a standpoint of a non-person, then the absurdity will show.’

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Strictly scrum.

Monday, 23 November 2020

Michelene Wandor: ‘For those who understand rugby, know its history and personnel, there will be riveting insights into the minutiae of who was chosen, who rejected, which managers did and didn’t do what. Haskells’ hero, Lawrence Dallaglio, appears at intervals, as an important influence. The book begins with a boat trip and a series of out-of-mind and scatological things happening.’

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Reflections on my first thirty years. Part V.

Wednesday, 10 June 2020

Alan Macfarlane: I began to realize that effective recall and research and discovery of new connections depended on how I indexed my materials. This led through my two doctorates into an elaborate hand-indexing system based on the ‘One Fact One Card’ method of Beatrice Webb, mediated to me through another very large influence on my intellectual life, Brian (now Sir Brian) Harrison, a few years ahead of me at Oxford.

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Reflections on my first thirty years. Part IV.

Sunday, 10 May 2020

Alan Macfarlane: ‘Because of the contending influences of my mother and devout uncle, perhaps partly because of the good fortune of living in Wordsworth’s valley, perhaps because of my experience of having feet in Protestant England, Celtic Scotland (through my father and Scottish ancestors) and polytheistic Assam and Nepal, I was always interested in spiritual matters.’

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Blind boys.

Thursday, 7 May 2020

Stephen Ward: ‘What both Pearson and Scapini realised- and acted upon – was that the ‘despair’ Lucas wrote of, was not insurmountable. One of the secrets of success in this respect was the kinship and the support systems among those afflicted. Life could go on.’

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Olive Custance.

Thursday, 23 April 2020

Ferdi McDermott: ‘A hitherto unpublished poem by Lord Alfred Douglas is a good example of the ability which he had to nurse a sense of personal hurt into a sense of invincible and righteous indignation. Although he did not include it in his published collections, he must have known that in sending it to his wife, at some time probably between 1913 and the late 1920s, it would eventually reach a wider audience…’

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Poems from ‘The Messenger House’.

Thursday, 9 April 2020

Janet Sutherland: ‘During the second journey they met Captain Spencer, a travel writer, who had just emerged from Quarantine having inadvertently crossed and re-crossed a border in dense woodland. Captain Spencer writes about meeting Davies and Gutch in one of his travel books. I loved the roundness of reading both their accounts, something I hadn’t expected to find when I first read the family journals.’

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Reflections on my first thirty years. Part III.

Sunday, 23 February 2020

Alan Macfarlane: ‘This was also a period when my teachers and  fellow doctoral students were being invigorated by new ideas of social and population history coming from France and by the archival revolution made possible by growing national wealth. it was a hopeful time, with a new engagement with international philanthropy and new experiments in cinema, drama, poetry, classical and ‘pop’ music.’

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Reflections on my first thirty years. Part II.

Monday, 23 December 2019

Alan Macfarlane: ‘It is difficult to remember those pre-internet ages and to remember that until the 1960s a family such as ours did not even have a telephone in the house. Even when we moved to Cambridge in 1971 home phones were not commonplace and we did not have one in our fenland home until the 1980s.’

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Tradition.

Friday, 29 November 2019

Enzo Kohara Franca: ‘In the New World the new language turned out to be the obstacle. Jichan failed to learn Brazilian Portuguese. The morphemes, phonemes, the cadence – none of it made any sense to the Japanese speaker inside his head.’

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Reflections on my first thirty years. Part I.

Thursday, 28 November 2019

Alan Macfarlane: ‘I first wrote down everything I thought I could remember about the period I was about to investigate. I then checked this against the diaries, letters and school reports. This has thrown some light on the way in which my memory works. It shows that, at least before I was ten, without supporting documentation almost everything would be irretrievable.’

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Harold Dickson, British Political Agent.

Monday, 11 November 2019

Piers Michael Smith: ‘This museum aims to remind us that the Dickson life is part of larger whole called Britain in relation to another whole called Kuwait, and that these two are themselves (implicitly) only parts of a still larger whole itself representational of another grander understanding.’

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E. M. Cioran and puttering therapy.

Tuesday, 8 October 2019

James Gallant: ‘Cioran in his mature writing evinces little interest in “good chunks of experience,” and as a recluse, he would have had few enough to contemplate. But given his disposition of mind that would not really have mattered. He was always concerned with human realities of a “universal” kind whose apprehension does not require extensive experience: the obfuscation of mortality by “doing”…’

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Empyrean Suite.

Friday, 12 July 2019

Anthony Howell: ‘James Kirkup said that “decidedly, Fawzi Karim is a poet for our times, with his strong yet beautiful voice, his indignation…and the haunting memories of certain lines that seem intended for all of us, but that few can hear in the endless tumult of what is called life.”’

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