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Index: Books & Publishing

Francis Thompson: A boy and his dog.

Katharine Tynan: Francis Thompson’s place in the poetry stands somewhere between Crashaw and Shelley, with each of whom he had affinities. He had the lofty spiritual passion and flight, “the flaming heart” of Crashaw, and he had the disembodied passion of Shelley, which had as much to do with common humanity and its wrongs and suffering as the cloud and the lark that Shelley rightly sang.

Me, Gordon Brown and Equality of Opportunity.

Anthony O’Hear: Equality of opportunity is only equality of outcome one stage further back….Equality of opportunity is the politically acceptable face of egalitarianism, which pretends to allow us to enjoy equality in a social and political sense, while keeping the rewards we may get from any work, luck or talent we may do or have. Not surprisingly such a confused and confusing vision is at the heart of the ‘new’ Labour project, but what had come to irk me was that post-1997 (and possibly earlier) ‘equality of opportunity’ has come to be a central plank of nice (or ‘compassionate’) conservatism.

Fragment: Concepts of Time and the World We Live In.

Alan Macfarlane, on arranging books: If we are to understand these changing paradigms in the past, and the way they swing in the present, we should note that they seem to shadow political relations and the rate of economic progress. The general rule appears to be that in periods of rapid economic and technological growth, especially when this is linked to political dominance and expansion by a certain civilization, confidence rises and optimistic, ‘progressive’ and teleological theories dominate.

Monochronos.

Monochronos – a previously unpublished poem by Hugh Chisholm.

Listening to the Dead.

Anthony O’Hear: I have no wish to be polemical here. I want simply to suggest that, for those with eyes to see and ears to hear, the most rewarding antidote to the mindlessness of the present, whether it be the insufferable complacency and narrowness of our leaders, or the banality and parochialism of the worlds of television and celebrity, is entry into the conversation which began with Homer – and which has continued (more or less) ever since, until perhaps now.

A Man of Letters.

H. R. Haxton: With…the kindliness of a skilled soldier who admonishes a camp-follower, he has, on two or three occasions, indicated to the writer some of the distinctions between good sword-play and mere battery. And, with his reluctant permission, I have of these wayside words made some semblance of the thing he most abhors—an “interview.”

The Production and Life of Books.

C. Kegan Paul: ‘It may seem an obvious matter that no one has any business to write if he have not something definite to say, which is, or at least appears, worth saying. But this is not so. If a person have fallen into poverty, say a lady left by the death of father or husband with limited means, or a gentleman who has failed in business, the lady is recommended to keep a school, the gentleman to take pupils, and both to write a book.’